Race Report

4 am June 27th finally arrived and I dragged myself out of bed, 1.5 hours after feeding Teia, to get ready for the half marathon I've been loosely training for over the past few months. Things had been looking sketchy for the past 2 weeks after an ankle flare up during our trip to the Vineyard. Limited running, ice, Vitamin I, magic tape and a fantastic physiotherapist resulted in me actually being able to line up for the race this morning at 6 am, together with 4000 other lunatics. I say lunatics in particular b/c some of these people actually trained on the course and knew what we were in for. I, on the other hand, was blissfully ignorant. I knew there was one decent hill on the course because words like "summit" and "great views" were used on the website, but the course was described as "rolling." Well, you can draw your own conclusions but below is the profile print out from my Garmin. In the words of my good friend Ryan Where Have All the Flats Gone?

This course was nasty! After training on mostly rail trail in our mostly flat town my poor ol' body was in for a shock. The first 5 miles went pretty much according to plan. I seem to take a VERY long time to warm up these days so I decided to just let my first 1 or 2 miles be what they would be and I was pleasantly surprised when they were both around 9 mins or a little less. Mile 3 and 4 were even better going sub 8:30 and I felt GOOD! No cramps, no tired legs, a little hot b/c of the super muggy weather, but generally good and I managed to maintain a decent pace up the hills, which lined up like soldiers one after another. I let the legs fly on the downhills, taking advantage and managing to briefly hold a pace well under 8 min/mile. I was hoping those fast spurts would make up from slowing down a little on the hills. I did something I've never done in a race before, I walked through the aide stations. At first it was a conscious decision to sacrifice a few seconds here and there in order to ensure that I had good hydration and nutrition. Later in the race it was purely for survival and the time loss was probably more like a minute per aide station.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. As I said the first 5 miles went according to plan. I had my game face on. Then I rounded the bend at mile 5 and looked up, and up, and up. Yikes! This must be the "summit." So I managed to hold a 9:30 pace up a very long and steep hill and I could hear conversations around me saying it was the toughest hill on the course. I crested the summit and immediately saw the leaders climbing up the backside of it. I felt like I had entered purgatory as I was actually going to have to turn around and climb out of it (the course was a bit odd with two out and back sections). By the half way point I knew I was in trouble. I have forgotten to mention that by this point the aide stations had run out of gatorade. I had decided against carrying my own drink and realized that this obviously, had been a bad decision. At the top of the next hill I passed through the mile 8 aide station only to discover not only were they out of gatorade, they were out of CUPS!! Who runs out of CUPS at a distance event that is open to thousands of people?!?!?!!? I was handed a gallon jug of water. I had a moment of pause while I thought about who else might have sucked on this jug, but it was only a moment before I was slurping down what I could and dumping some over my head.

The rest of the race was a death march with small moments where I was able to get my legs to move close to my goal pace. I felt on the edge of cramping most of the time despite sucking down 2 gels and 3 cliff blocks. Cans of ice cold coke taunted me in my imagination. I realized that my goal of being well within a 1 hr 50ish finish time was completely impossible but figured if I could slug out 10 minute miles til the end I'd be in under 2 hours. Then we started up the last big hill, at mile 11. Yes, I did say nasty. Most races have one hill like this, if any, and not in the last two miles. At that point my motivation was "if I run a little bit faster, I'll be finished a little bit sooner and out of my misery!"

When I finally finished in a time of 2:03 my disappointment at completing my slowest ever half marathon eventually gave way to a feeling of accomplishment that I finished such a tough course with a reasonable finish time. I admit it was a struggle not to walk on some of those hills but I managed to keep going, even if I wasn't moving fast at all. After the race when the burning in my legs had subsided, I told Greg I was going to find another half, on a flatter course, to run in a few weeks because I had a feeling I had a much faster race in me, under different conditions. He looked at me like I was looney tunes, which of course I was. Sanity has returned and now I'm thinking, maybe just a 10k.