Is that blood or chili powder? (warning: contains explicit potty language)
Three weeks ago I finished St. George 70.3. Since then the job really kicked in and my workouts went from 6 to 4 per week; the long bikes vanished. I knew I had this half marathon coming up on my calendar; my family and I do it every Memorial Day weekend up in Traverse City, Michigan. It’s a spring tradition. While it’s not a tri, it is a race, and there is not really a B race in my vocabulary. There is B preparation, but not B racing. When the gun goes off I’m leaving it all on the course, whatever it is; sometimes it’s not much.
In April, about 4 weeks earlier, I hit a PR at a 5k. It was just a 6 second PR, but when you get over 50, a PR means that you're beating the aging process—running more efficiently, losing weight, something other than nature working for you. I was hoping to leverage that same fitness and maybe pull off a PR in the half. I wasn’t really training for a fast half, the old B training thing. Anyway my Morton’s Neuroma was under “control” thanks to some orthodics I made by gluing parallel sections of drinking hose from an old Speedfil system onto insoles to keep the pressure off the nerve. My wife calls them Steve Skis, and I have to say they work better than anything I have gotten from the doc so far. Except they do kind of drill into the ball of my foot sometimes, but maybe with some moleskin….
A couple days before the race my wife suggested that I take it easy and run for fun. I would have listened, but I don’t really understand what that means. If running for fun means giving up, I don’t want to do that. If it means sight-seeing, I do that early in the morning in a new city before everyone else is up, not on a well-worn course with a crowd of people who all want to run faster than me. No, I couldn’t understand her words, so I started planning my race. I decided to attempt a pace somewhere between my previous PR and the time my vdot suggested. My vdot suggested that I run a half in X but my PR is X + 2minutes. So I decided to split the difference and program my Garmin Forerunner 305 to shave a minute off my PR. Just one little minute.
Work was crazy the two days before the race, and I didn’t do any workouts. Maybe that’s not so bad, but my gut also decides to take a holiday so I’m really stopped up. My youngest son’s birthday is the Friday before the race, and it was my job to make the ribs—his favorite dinner. Ribs and cake, not the best pre-race dinner for an older, stopped-up guy like me. Clouds are beginning to gather.
So, I make the rib dust: chili powder, steak seasoning, brown sugar, salt. The cake has gobs of green icing—grass—and a soccer ball on top with more frosting—white and black. Four layers with cream in between. Three of us are supposed to be running the race tomorrow--me, my wife and my son. After the birthday dinner, everyone wants to bail on the race—except me. I have to be the example. Everyone else can bail, but I feel like I have to show some discipline. I’m from the Midwest, so I just smile and wonder what’s going to happen to me tomorrow.
Race Morning
The race is two hours north of my home, and we don’t have a hotel, so everyone is up at 3am for a 3:30am departure. My gut is like a brick, and the three cups of applesauce I send down just gets put in line for processing. Normally after a breakfast of applesauce I explode. This time it’s just a fizzle, and 32oz. of Gatorade feels like a Dixie cup. Well, I can still pretend to race even if my gut feels like it is filled with cement. Anyway, there’s no backing out now. What would I tell the family: My tummy hurts? I’m the guy who rides a bike to work in Michigan in January in a blizzard. On the two hour drive up, I don’t even need a rest room. I just drive all the way there and park the car at packet pick up.
At packet pick up I’m definitely feeling the Gatorade and I take care of business with some success at the portable toilet, but there’s still those ribs kicking around with the applesauce packed in behind. I know I’m going to have to pay for that birthday dinner sometime. But I’m feeling much better, like maybe I can even run, so I get in line for the bus to the starting line.
The bus trip is about 20 minutes up the Old Mission peninsula of Grand Traverse Bay. In spite of my B training and my gut and the ribs and the apple sauce, I’m feeling optimistic. It’s a beautiful spring day, the kind that we all hope for—cool, sunny, gentle breeze—this is a really nice day. There’s frost in the field where the bus drops us off. A lot of skin and goose bumps. The warming tent is crowded like the women’s restroom at a rock concert. I go for a warm-up jog, do four strides, then strip down to my running clothes and turn in my clothes bag. The start is filling in, so I move to my familiar spot behind the race rabbits.
The gun goes off and I start my watch. It’s a good start, enough people to make it feel like something big, and we have two lanes, so we can pass without running off the road. I keep checking my watch to make sure I’m on pace, and I am, for now. The first 5k is good, the gut says its going along for the ride, and I’m holding the pace. At mile five I take a gel and I have to stop for a drink and when I get going again I’m behind the pace. I run to catch up, but now I’m working too hard. At the next water stop I have the same struggle, except each mile it gets worse. Drink, get off pace, overwork to catch up, drink. It doesn’t help that my foot is starting to bark about my home-made orthodics. It’s at this point I start to have that talk with myself: Unless the way I feel changes dramatically, I can’t hold the pace. It’s frustrating because I feel like I have it in me, but I can’t get it out. So I decide to go into my cruising mode--maintain form, push reasonably hard, try to keep up a good pace, wait for a break somewhere. Once in a while I get passed, but I don’t see anyone from my age group coming along, so no need for despair. I’m not feeling great, but I can keep going at a decent pace.
In the last 5k I try to speed up but the engine won’t fire. Last mile, I decide it’s time to for the final push, so I chase down a runner or two, and in turn a couple of runners chase me down. In the chute I sprint it out with a guy who takes me by about 1 second. I see the clock. I’m not surprised. Disappointed, sure, but not surprised. Three minutes higher than my PR. Not even something you want your friends to see.
After a short meet and greet with my wife (who decided not to run--another story) I get my gear out of my car and have a recovery drink on the way to the shower. Just as I get in the locker room door, the apple sauce rams into the ribs and I realize that the dam is about to burst open. For a moment I think I’m bleeding internally, but then realize that my rib dust contained ¼ cup of chili powder. That disaster averted, I grab a shower and spend the rest of the day shopping around with the family. At 3pm we get in the car and drive 2 hours home—I drive.
I’m always curious to see if anyone from my area beat me in a race, so I pull up the results at home. The URL on the race website doesn’t want to work, so I go directly to the timer’s website and drill down to the results. I run a search: half marathon, male, 50-54, boom. Somehow I managed to hold second place in my age group out of 50 something runners. Hmmm…that’s nice, although first place beat me by a mile, literally. And the guy who beat me by one second, he’s the only other guy from my town in the race. Ironic (although he is 14 years younger).
In my post mortem, I wondered why I couldn’t hold the pace. I guess my answer is when you treat a race as a B race, you get a B time no matter how hard you want to push it. The two days before a race are really critical for getting the necessary nutrition and rest, and I just didn’t make that happen this time. So, I got what I got, and I was lucky to get it.
Comments
I thought for sure there was going to be a 'behind-the-bushes' interlude as part of your race......
Head to Vitamin Shoppe and pick up some Magnesium Citrate next time that happens... Works like a charm! (but... uh.... give it a day or so or you WILL have a diving for the bushes moment!)
Congrats on your finish!!!