Running Thread 2014 - Page 25

I got up around 5 on Sunday morning after an extremely bad sleep to drink some coffee and try and calm my nerves. I hadn’t raced since last August before Sunday and I found the prospect worrying and exciting in equal measure. A bit of chocolate milk and some reading helped me stay calm.

One of the many things worrying me was the weather. It’s been beastly hot here for most of August, but in the days leading up to the marathon it seemed we had crossed abruptly into fall. It was somewhere south of 10 degrees C (that’s 50 Farenheit) when I got up, and I thought that might be too cold for comfort during the race. I was wrong about this. I did my warmup in a hoodie and felt very comfortable racing in a t-shirt.

I’d done a bad job of timing my warmup, leaving about 10 minutes from finishing my routine until the start of the race. The warmup itself went very well, though. I did 20 minutes of easy cruising with a few accelerations to race pace and felt very ready. I also ran into a guy I knew who was gunning for a 1:23. Chatting with him helped calm me down a good deal. (He also made his time, yeehaw!)

Anyway, I wildly underestimated how crowded the race chute would be, and had to pull some bold moves to get up near the front before the national anthem started.

Normally I am the last person in the world the barge through a crowd–and I say this as a Canadian. We invented being passive-aggressive with manners! But the prospect of losing two minutes weaving through the pack outweighed the risks of being rude in my mind. One of the advantages of being skinny is that you can slide through crowds pretty easy, I guess.

And then the gun went off and everyone rushed through the gate. In my last few races I’ve done a bad job of pacing, going out considerably faster than goal pace and then suffering for it in the later stages. Wise to the wiles of the pre-race atmosphere, this time I did a better job of running my own race. But I still went out a bit too fast.

The fact that everyone else does it doesn’t help any. It kind of blows my mind that, even among the most experienced runners at a race of this size, nearly everyone blows up within the first half. About 30 runners hit the first mile somewhere around 5:30, and for all but a handful, this was practically suicide pace.

The field slowly broke up between 4k and 9k. I passed a good number of people here, but not because I was trying to make a statement. Everyone else was just slowing down. After forcibly trying to hold up between 2k and 4k, I’d settled into what felt like a sustainable pace with 3:27km showing on my watch. I’d come up on a pack of runners and listen to their breathing. They all sounded like they were working far too hard to me. I’d push a little bit to get them out of my immediate field of vision so I could concentrate on running my pace. I think your subconcious will lock you into the pace of whoever you are close to if you are not careful, and I didn’t want that to happen yet because I didn’t think anyone around me would get under 1:15. I remember hitting 5k at 17:30 or so and 10k at 34-something.

At around 9k I fell in with two guys who seemed like good partners. I recognized both of them from our local running scene and knew they both had marathon PRs in the mid 2:30s.

This was the best part of the race for me. In my four years of running I had never experienced this: real racing, on a course with something at stake, against people around my ability. We three cruised along, weighing our remaining strength and wondering what our rivals were capable of, listening to the cheers of the crowd and our own breathing. I hope never forget this feeling.

This brought on another first for me. I had to think of something to do if it came down to the wire. Should I make like Farah and try to surge ahead in the final 800? Should I hit it with 5k to go and try to hang on? Should I split the difference and make a move heading into the last mile? It was exciting to think about these things–or to try to, anyway. Fatigue was beginning to dull my mind a bit.

Lucky for me, my chess-playing abilities didn’t enter into the equation. Around 13k–which is also when I saw a dude running the full marathon in a Batman costume–I looked down at my watch and saw that it read 3:28/km. We were slowing down.

I pushed a bit, hoping I wouldn’t spark an 8k dash for the finish. I hit the next two k in 3:24 and 3:25. My two rivals mostly hung on. I didn’t look behind me, but I could hear their watches beep every kilometre, and the crowd call out their names. My lead couldn’t have been more than a hundred metres.

With 5k to go, where I had planned to hit the jets if we were still bunched up, I found my jets weren’t much in the mood for being hit. I hung on, feeling a bit like a hunted animal, wondering when I would be passed. The half marathon course overlaped the 10k course at this point, so the road became thick with other runners and I lost track of my pursuers.

But at 2k to go, I was still in the lead. There is a long bridge in Edmonton called the High Level that I often run over, including when I’ve got about 2k to go on medium-long and long runs. I try to push it when I’m on it, and I tried to pretend I was on the High Level at this point.

It worked. I managed a surge or two to ward off a sprint finish, crossing the line 15 seconds ahead of my pursuers.

Other than a 1:15 finish, I’d hoped to land somewhere in the top 10 of this race. The half marathon is usually the marquee event on the local running calendar, but I still thought a 1:14 or so would put me somewhere around sixth.

But this turned out to be a scorching field. The winner clocked 1:03:37. Second place was 1:03:58, and third was 1:04:16. A guy named Kip Kangogo who is probably the strongest runner in the province and who has a legitimate shot at making the Canadian team for Rio 2016, and who I thought was the odds-on favorite to win, finished fourth in 1:05:21.

A bit of googling revealed the top two dudes as sub-2:15 marathoners. Ian Burrell, who was second, finished third at the US Half Marathon Championships last year.

So I’m probably more proud of 9th place than I have any right to be. Actually, my only real negative from the whole experience is that I didn’t get to see the elite field go by because of the course route. Those dudes are on a whole other plane, and it would have been great to see them in battle against one another.

And now, of course, I’m chomping at the bit to get to Portland.