rockstar

ETA: official time: 21:53! 2nd in my age group, 5th woman, 24th place overall.

here, have a laugh at my face!



21:5x (exact time TBA) in this morning's 5K. I might have shed one tiny thrilled tear just after I crossed the finish line. my goals were, in prioritized order, as follows:

1. break PR (24:03)
2. break 23 minutes
3. look sweet in my new shoes.

nowhere on there do you see "break 22 minutes," but THERE IT IS, PEOPLE. I feel like one hundred million dollars. ONE HUNDRED MILLION. perhaps even two hundred million.

I finally ran a smart race: a 7:37 first mile, then a 7:15ish average for the rest of the race. I don't have the final mile split because I forgot to hit the reset button on my watch, and my overall average time was thrown off by forgetting to hit the stop button AGAIN at the end of the race. BUT THAT'S OKAY. BECAUSE NOW I'VE GOT A 21-MINUTE 5K.

the first mile I probably checked my watch 30 times, because I started out at a 6:30 pace and had to talk myself down for the first 300 meters or so. "no, slower." "no, SERIOUSLY, slower." the opening pace felt so easy that it was really good I had my garmin or I would have killed it too early. I let myself open it up a little once I passed the one mile mark -- and it's an indication of how good I felt that I assumed the "1" was 1 KILOMETER until I checked my GPS.

in mile two I tried to stop looking at my damn wrist every four seconds and just aimed for holding steady, feeling relaxed, and pretending it was just a training run.

in the last mile we left the official race track and took a detour around the grounds, which turned out to be a good distraction. I passed a bunch of people who'd gone out too fast, and I felt a little bad about it. don't I know how that is, eh?

just after I passed a high school xc kid, his coach said, "you're a sprinter now! time to go!" and I thought, sir, that is music to my ears. I realized we were pretty close to the finish so I gunned it. we had to go around a set of bleachers to reach the track and my only regret is not having more of the track to finish on, because it's only once I can see the finish that I turn on the turbo. just as I could make out the clock (I was running too fast to look at my watch), I realized it said 21:52 and I did in fact say, out loud, "NO NO NO NO" and then turned on all the engines and motored in to finish under 22. UNDER 22!

it may be a testament to how much faster I could probably have run that I did not dry heave at the end of this race. I always dry heave. seriously. gross, but true. any time I sprint the finish like that, I have one terrible moment where I think I'm gonna boot it all over the grass, and then I'm good.

which is to say, of course now I'm thinking, I could probably break 21. since I've been running, on average, a paltry 10-15 miles a week and have incorporated absolutely zero speedwork.

anyway, let's enjoy the moment, let's not get ahead of ourselves.

I'm very proud of this:



steady!

now I'm gonna go eat a plate of bacon and chestbump a stranger BECAUSE I CAN

it speaks for itself

I did it! In 24:01 -- if only I'd looked down at my watch I could have broken 24 minutes!

roadkill

So, I've been having this problem recently with my running, and that problem is that I am a competitive lunatic. The scenario plays out this way: I get dressed for a run, usually at work, and to make it easier on myself I say, "Today I'm just going go relax; I'm not going to worry about pace. I'm just going to hang back and mull some things over in my brain and take it easy." It's easier for me to get out of the office and onto the trail if I promise that it won't be hard.

Then I go out and I try to make my first mile easy, which is harder than it sounds, since I usually think I'm going an average or even slightly slower pace only to look down at my Garmin and discover I'm running, like, a 7:40 mile.

Inevitably what happens next is I come upon some poor soul, or maybe even a group of poor souls, who are casually biding their time, running at their pace, maybe talking, maybe lost in a running reverie. And they're going maybe 10-15 seconds/mile slower than I am. I think to myself, "I should stay behind them, I should pace off of them and just RELAX ALREADY and quit being a fasthole." But inevitably I can't control myself; I inch closer and closer behind them until I'm drafting. Then I turn into a ninja. I try to make myself very quiet so they won't know I'm drafting, and I try for several hopeless moments to STAY SLOW, JERKSAUCE.

Then of course I'm spotted, and I feel sheepish for drafting in a FREAKING RECREATIONAL RUN and I sheepishly pass.

The next scenario that occurs on the run -- and I swear, these things happen in this order every time -- is I come across someone ahead of me who runs at exactly my pace, or maybe just a second or two per mile faster. I see them up ahead, I gauge their speed, and the rational, non-jerk part of my head says, "Don't do it!" But the universe conspires against me and that person stops to tie her shoe, or stops so his dog can pee, or maybe I have in advance (honestly) decided to make this one section of the trail my 'sprint' section.

So, I pass. Of course when I pass I make sure I have perfect form and look totally awesome.

Then I spend the entire rest of my run, which can be anywhere from half a mile to two excruciating miles, fretting that I'm going to get passed back. An old belief of mine, back from my sprinting days, is that you never ever ever look back to see where your competition is. In sprinting, you don't look back primarily because doing so throws off your speed; in every other form of running I think it just makes you look intimidated.

Also, it tips off the person you've just passed that you're an over-competitive nutjob.

The reality is, I love to race. I'm a very competitive person by nature and I love to go fast. But I haven't truly raced in years, since I'm now a middle-of-the-pack distance runner (rather than a sprinter). I'm no competition in the events I enter now because I'm inevitably going up against people who can run a 6-minute mile or better. Of course, I can race within my cluster of like-paced runners; I can race people the last 100 yards or so to the finish (I have a good kick); I can race against my own pace. But at the end of the day I still mostly end up finishing 25th or 85th or even further down the roster, depending on the size of the race.

I bring this up because yesterday, during my weekly Friday run with friends, we were chatting about pace (we were running about a 10:15 mile) and they were teasing me about how much I had to slow down to stay with the pack. "What's your 5k pace?" a friend asked, and when I answered (I train at about an 8:15 mile), another friend said, "You know, there's a 5K on Sunday that I bet you could win."

...

So, YOU GUYS. guess what I'm doing tomorrow morning??!

wings

I SO TOTALLY ROCKED the Shamrock 15K this morning. My main points of anxiety were a) I haven't run more than 8 miles at a time since TWO SUMMERS AGO (geez) and b) I haven't trained hills at all and this course had a doozy of a hill, a long 2.5 mile calf buster. But: calves intact! No muscles busted!

I flew through the course. I ended up finishing in roughly 1:22 (according to my Garmin; official results are still pending). That's an 8:41/mi average, which is astonishing to me considering the hill and the first mile, when I was running at best a 9:15. 8:41!!! That's only about 10 seconds slower than my ordinary pace on my mid-week 3.5 milers. That is awesome. I regret not hitting the lap button for each mile -- I'd love to know how fast I ran the last three miles, in order to compensate for how much I surely slowed running up the hill. Maybe faster than 8:00/mi?!

Out of curiosity this afternoon I went back and looked up my race results from the only other 15K race I've ever run, the 2004 Utica Boilermaker. I had been training that year too, albeit in a much more lackadaisical way. I had never had a distance running coach and I was still figuring out whether or not I could even convince myself to be a distance runner. I had not yet run a marathon. My time? 1:47:17 -- an 11:31/mi average. WHOA!

So basically I feel like a freaking rockstar right now. I'm actually in BETTER shape than I realized. When does that happen?? It made me begin to wonder if there could ever be a BQ in my future. The Boston qualifying time for women ages 18-34 is a 3:40, or roughly an 8:24/mi. I can sustain that over 4 miles but it would obviously take a lot more work to maintain it for a whole marathon. And of course that would mean, uh, running a qualifying marathon. I don't have a marathon planned in my future, and in fact I had decided to focus on smaller distances this year. But I'm perfectly on track right now to run a strong marathon in the fall...

We'll see.

I should say, though, that I'm not as much of a rockstar as the two people (there might have been more) who ran the entire race barefoot.