DopeyBadger
Imagathoner
- Joined
- Oct 15, 2015
Hopefully things turn around.
Thanks Billy and Sarah. So far, the place we planned to go for dinner is closed due to technical difficulties, second choice had an hour and a half wait (not doable with a toddler). We landed at a last resort place where they ended up having to comp a meal because it came out underdone not once, but twice.Hopefully things turn around.
Thanks Billy and Sarah. So far, the place we planned to go for dinner is closed due to technical difficulties, second choice had an hour and a half wait (not doable with a toddler). We landed at a last resort place where they ended up having to comp a meal because it came out underdone not once, but twice.
Ugh. That's not a good way to spend an evening.
It wasn’t the best. But I got pizza and beer after the race and am now sitting at Nats Park watching the Nats beat the Dodgers, so life isn’t all bad
I finished my half in 2:25 and some change. A little off my goal but a massive PR.
Yay!!! Rooting for you!I’m ready to get started on training for my next race this fall, though!
RACE RECAP: St. Michael's Running Festival
May 19, 2018The TL;DR is that I PR'd this race, but I didn't meet the projected time based on my training plan, and I wasn't in the +/- 5 minutes of that projected time that I had set as a goal.
The week leading up to the race was a little crazy. It was my last week at my old job. I got in my taper runs but had to be really flexible. Billy gave me instructions about timing the last runs, so I had to be careful with that. The plan was that I would go in to work on Friday morning for my last day there, leave around midday, come home and grab my husband and daughter, and we'd head out to St. Michael's, which is on Maryland's eastern shore. Travel time should have been around an hour and forty, but I figured since it was a Friday, we'd be closer to hours. We'd get in, go to dinner at a pizza place that got rave reviews, grab my bib at the expo, and then head to our hotel.
But then the weather. The weather decided that it wanted to be the theme for this race. So naturally, it rained hard much of the week. Especially that Friday. Which totally snarled traffic. It took north of four hours to get there. We reached what should have been the halfway point (the Bay Bridge, for any locals), and seriously debated just turning around. I knew the race conditions weren't going to be great, and DH was injured and wasn't racing. So was it worth it to me to push through? Or should I just turn my family around and find a place for my kid to eat dinner, especially since I was starting to get concerned that we weren't going to make the expo in time. Ultimately, we decided to push through since we'd already paid for the race and the hotel, but it was a real close call.
Luckily, traffic eased up and we got to St. Michael's around 7:30. I got my bib and race shirt, and my husband bought my daughter a cowbell (note to self: toddlers and cowbells are loud combos). We headed towards the pizza place, which was to be the only saving grace of this entire evening's ordeal (remember, I love pizza, and they had a great craft beer list), only to find that it was closed due to a "technical difficulty." What? St. Michael's is a small town. There isn't a lot of game in town when it comes to food. The Italian restaurant had a 90 minute wait, not doable with a kid. Mexican place? Not kid friendly... "not enough room for the highchair because there are so many people at the bar tonight." We finally found a place called Awful Arthur's and it lived up to it's name. But whatever, my kid was fed. Off to the hotel.
Race day: The hotel was about a mile from the start, so my husband very kindly dropped me there. I was there about 30 minutes before the start of the race, but since I was in wave 4 and they released the waves 7 minutes apart, I actually had about an hour to wait around. Before the first wave, they announced two things: The port-a-potty at mile 6 had been removed due to standing water, and that miles 8-12 had a lot of standing water, so runners had to be really cautious). Lovely. Looking forward to it. (/sarcasm)
I ended up being in the front of my corral when they brought us up, which ended up being a good thing because I didn't have a ton of weaving to do. The pacer I had wanted to keep an eye on was in corral 3, which was frustrating, so I was kind of on my own. I got off to a fine start, around 10:36/mile, which was around where Coach and I had talked about. It misted, then it rained, then it misted again. The course was pretty. Course support was good. But there were a TON of out-and-backs. I didn't mind the first two because they were in pretty areas, but after that they got really old, really fast. Lots of water stations, and I made it a point to get water at each one since I wasn't carrying my own water (I was carrying tailwind). Naturally, around mile six, right where I knew they had had to remove a port-a-potty, I needed one. So the mental debate about where the next one would be occupied my mind the next couple of miles. Around here I started to pass people from the coral in front of me, which was also a nice mental boost. Chomp chomp. Finally found it at mile 8, and, yay! No line. But I knew coming out that the worst of the race was still ahead of me with the standing water.
And it was. Apparently my husband and daughter were right around there trying to cheer me on, but it sounds like I was ahead of them by a couple of minutes so they missed me at the (yet another) turnaround they were trying to catch me at. Shortly after, we hit the standing water. And there was a lot of it. I was already soaked top to bottom because it had rained for a lot of the race, but nothing kills your moral like running through ankle deep water 9 miles into a race and then knowing that you have to go through ANOTHER turnaround and run through it again. Ugh. At that point, my shoes were getting really heavy from the water and my hips were starting to hurt because of it. I started to feel comfortable just pushing through, regardless of my time. "Keep running. Don't let your discomfort/dismay ruin the race." I saw my husband and kiddo around mile 12 and that was a nice little jolt to get me to the finish line. I crossed in 2:25:13. Billy and I had adjusted my race expectations based on the weather, so a 2:25 finish was in line with those adjustments. And it was a PR. But my training plan had me finishing in 2:18:12, so 2:25:13 was not within my +/- 5 minute goal.
So what happened and what would I change? I think my failure to meet my goal was all mental. Billy's training plan gave me the tools to do what I needed to do. I had the fitness. Even with missed runs and adjustments. I felt fine after the race. Sore and creaky, but I had gas left in the tank. I think my mental toughness just "gave out." I NEVER felt the fire to dominate in this race, and when it got both warm and rainy and I started running through standing water, I let myself just think "you know what, this is good enough, I'm going to run what feels comfortable and... whatever." And so I didn't push myself mentally enough to get more uncomfortable than I already was, and when I started fading into 11+ minute miles in the last 5 miles, I didn't tell myself that I could and should do better. I told myself it was fine. On the bright side, it's nice to know that high-10s/low-11s is now "comfortable" even in crummy conditions. I think that says something about my overall fitness. I have Coach to thank for that and myself to blame for not doing more with it.
All-in-all, I'm kinda meh about this race. The conditions were not good, but neither was my mental game. I could have done better, but I didn't want to in those moments. So I need to focus on mental toughness. I'll talk about how that's going to translate to my upcoming cycle in a future post.
Honestly, given all the circumstances around this race, I'd say you handled it quite well. And actually to be so close to our adjusted numbers given the conditions says quite a bit when you were running more comfortably than racing. I'd say brighter race days are ahead (well hopefully not like scorching sun bright...).
One thing I forgot to add that I'll also say in my testimonial, but it merits mention: I never once was afraid that I wasn't going to finish this race. Not before, not during. Not only that, but I was confident enough in my fitness to be miffed that I was in wave 4 instead of 3. That's totally a testimonial to the plans you've written for me and the experience I've gained using them. It was SO nice to go into the race confident that I'd finish, with the only question being "how well" I could do.