Race Report: the ups and downs of the weekend double

Round 1: An 800m road race down in Springfield, Oregon on Friday night. A straight line drag race, aka the most fun ever.

Is driving 4.5 hours to race for ~2.5 minutes worth it? Hell yeah it is.

It's only been 3 or 4 years since my last 1500, but it's been 22 years since my last 800. Wait, 22 years?! Yes, 22 years. Wow.
And, to make things worse, I'm not fit right now. I'm not even remotely race fit.
But I couldn't resist signing up for this race. How many chances do you get to run a road 800? One a year. That's it.

I had a good long warmup (the shorter the race, the longer the warm up), during all of which I felt awful. This is common for me, but it is still unnerving. Once I was hanging out in the start area and doing strides, though, my legs started to wake up. They actually felt kind of light and springy. It's been a while since I've had that feeling.

I was nervous at the start. Super nervous. Probably the most nervous I've been for a race in the last couple of years. The only thing I felt certain of was that I would go out at the wrong pace (whether it was too fast or too slow), since I no longer have any feel for this race distance. The race director was nice enough to put signs up at 200, 400, and 600, but I had doubts about the accuracy of the placement (well founded doubts, as it turned out).

They had merged the mens and womens masters heats into one heat, which I was pretty stoked about. Now I would definitely not be leading. Also, a couple of the fast men lining up in front of me were friends I hadn't seen in a while. It's fun to chase your friends.

We finally lined up to go. I reminded myself to breathe, since if I forgot, it would be too late before I realized it. A guy next to me inquired as to my goal. I told him 2:30 was probably optimistic. He said he would love to run a 2:30. (By the way, people at master's events/races are just as competitive as anyone else, but they are often about 10 times friendlier than anyone else. It's a fact. Google it.)

TK turned around and gave me a fist bump and then off we went. Pack of 4 dudes instantly in front, followed by me and a few guys on either side of me. I had no idea how fast I was running, but it wasn't so fast that I was worried about it. I was instantly breathing hard, though. We passed the 200 sign, I glanced at my watch and saw 43. What? Well, that sign was obviously wrong, but it was still a little disconcerting to see. I stepped on it a little, and the guy next to me said something about us being on 5 minute pace. I assumed he was reading that off his GPS, but I wasn't buying it. I thought we were probably slower. At any rate, I was speeding up and people next to me began to slip back.

Right about this time, I was overwhelmed with this weird wave of muscle fatigue. It rolled over me like some sort of shock wave to the body, and for about 3 seconds I thought I was going to tie up 1/4 of the way through the race. But then it passed, somewhere something in my body said, man up, legs!, and off we went, actually feeling ok.

At the 400 sign, my watch read 83 or something like that. Again, definitely wrong, and this time I felt more confident that they were just all going to be wrong so to hell with the signs.

And this is where I went a little wrong. Even though I surged a little bit at the 400 sign, I also felt myself hesitate. I had no muscle memory of this kind of effort anymore. I doubted myself.

I didn't slow down. I just didn't go for it.

And I know this because when I passed the 600 sign, I stepped on it again. I asked my body to go go go!, and it actually responded. I found the next set of gears so easily that I knew I had been too cautious. There is no time for hesitation in a race that short. If you have it at halfway, you'd better damn well start using it.

It made for a fun finish, though. One guy ahead had fallen off the front pack and I briefly entertained visions of catching him as I dug for the finish (he was actually still well ahead, but it always helps to put a target on the back of the next person in front of you). As the clock came into focus, I saw the 2:30 mark slip by, but not by too much.

It's hard to explain how fun that race was. Here's the best I can do:
I walked out the chute, spent a minute or so catching my breath, and then I turned to the guys and said: ok, let's give ourselves about 20 minutes or so to rest, and then let's go do that AGAIN!!

It was that fun. I can't think of another race ever where I've crossed the line and wanted immediately to jog back down to the start line and do it again. And this was a race where I'd technically run pretty poorly (my all out 800 time was almost exactly the pace I ran for my mile pr a few years back).
But even though the downer part of my brain could point to the numbers as proof of sucking, I didn't care. It was the fastest I've run in the shitstorm of a running year I've had since the great norovirus incident of October 2013. And it was FUN.

The whole event was fun. Right after our heat, I got to watch the open heat, where my Oiselle teammate Liz Anjos kicked some serious ass, looking totally relaxed while running a big PR and grabbing the win. Then there was the elite mens race, where we got to watch some Olympians tearing down the middle of the street in front of their friends, teammates, and the locals.

Despite the fact that the race is located in a town full of elite runners, for the second year in a row there was no elite womens race (because no one signed up). I find this interesting and unfortunate, but I guess not too surprising. There were quite a few elite women at the race, but they chose to run with their teammates as a centipede and not race individually.

Round 2: Small 5k in downtown Portland Sunday morning. The course was flat, and an out-and-back.

It's only been two weeks since I ran my starting point 5k, so I wasn't expecting a big drop in my time. I figured I would probably run maybe 10-20 seconds faster, mostly because I'm feeling physically more comfortable running at higher speeds, not because I've made any great fitness gains in the past two weeks.

But on race morning, my mindset was not that great. I wanted to be going in to the race relaxed and just looking for a little improvement. No big deal.
Instead I was a little tense and grumpy.

The race went off. It was indeed a small race, and right away there was only one woman near me, and maybe 7 or 8 dudes ahead. I tried to settle in and relax, but the one woman was running just a couple of steps ahead of me, and I found it hard to let her go. (Not having the confidence to run your own pace is the first sign of impending race fail for me, by the way. When I'm feeling good and confident, I'll let everyone go at the start because I know most of them are coming back. When you try too hard too early, you're only making things worse for yourself.)

I kept trying to ease back, but the woman and the guy she was running with were just a teeny tiny bit faster and I let it mess with my system. My watch beeped one mile at 5:52 (there were no mile markers), which was about 10 seconds faster than I'd been planning to start. Not good. My legs have started to feel better recently and thus they're trying to get back to the 5:35-5:40 5k pace I was running a year ago, but my fitness is way out in nowheresville and cannot even begin to keep up with them.

Plus, it was not a comfortable 5:52. I was not even remotely relaxed.
Trying not to panic at the thought of how awful the next 2 miles were going to be, I said to myself, "ok, what's done is done. Just relax. If we just back off a little, we can still keep it around 6 min/mile, and that will be just fine."

I labored along for a few more minutes, and then the turnaround was up ahead.

The course was an out-and-back of the most literal nature. The start and finish were right next to each other, and you stayed on the same road the whole time. When you hit the turnaround, therefore, you could look at your watch, multiply by 2, and see what total time you're on.

I'd been thinking about that as I approached the turnaround, because I was already struggling and I wanted to look at my watch and see some positive feedback. I wanted to look and see something like 9:15, or 9:20, so I could remind myself that I was still on track. Instead I saw 9:37. I was like, wait...  what?!? How am I at 9:37 if my first mile was 5:52? I went out too fast and I'm only on pace for a 19:14? Sure, I backed off a little after that first mile..  but...  my head was spinning trying to do the math on how much I must have slowed down. But the people in front of me weren't really pulling away either, and I hadn't been passed..  it just didn't make sense.

Now normally, I would have jumped to the most obvious conclusion right away, but as I alluded to earlier, I was not on my mental game this morning. So within minutes of the turnaround, my brain plunged into negativity of the most deleterious sort. I felt awful, I hated racing, I hated my low iron, I hated my body for not being able to absorb iron from food, I hated it all. (This might be a good place to point out that I also got my period the night before this race. So, you know. I was ripe for hating.)

So deep in this useless negativity was I that when my watch beeped my second mile split of 6:07, I still was unable to jump to the obvious conclusion. 5:52 + 6:07 = sub 6 pace. NOT 19:14 for 5k, in other words.

Then my running really started to suck. The third mile was most definitely slower, on the order of 20 seconds slower. It was gruesome. Sure, some of this was physical, but at least 10 or 15 seconds of it was mental. The last mile of a 5k is all about staying focused. I had no focus.

The one thing that finally snapped me back to reality was watching the woman in front of me. She was still running with the guy, but she kept veering slightly off the course: outside the cones at an intersection, up onto the sidewalk, and then finally, she pulled off and stopped. She wasn't registered for the race. She was helping the guy with his race, and she did the right thing and stepped off the course a couple hundred meters before the finish.

So all that time I was feeling sorry for myself, I was technically winning the race. Yeah. That made me feel like a jerk. But it also allowed me to wake up and make a little push for the finish.

The clock came into focus with appalling numbers ticking away, 19:30 something, and then 40 something, and then I finally finished. I was too discouraged to even bother stopping my watch, but I did look down at it. And what did I see? 3.26 miles. Duh. The course was long. Of course it was long. Any other day, when things like mile markers and turnaround cones are placed at locations that don't make sense with what I see on my watch, I assume that the mile markers and turnaround cones are in the wrong place. (See Round 1 above!) Garmins are not accurate to the .01, of course, but when you run a short, relatively straight race, they're going to be pretty close. Plus, you know when a course is long or short. You just know.

So, while it's difficult to understand how you can mess up measuring such a simple course, I put most of the blame for my crappy attitude on myself. When I hit the turnaround, my confusion should have quickly turned to irritation that the course was long, and then I should have re-focused myself and charged home as best as I could. I've done that before. You can always do the math and figure out your real 5k time later.

The good news is that even with the too fast start and the mental disaster of the second half, my adjusted time was about 18:49. That's fifteen seconds faster than I ran two weeks ago. Yes, it's still well over a minute slower than a year ago, but all I'm looking for right now is a little sign that I'm moving in the right direction, however slowly.

Harvest Classic 5k Race Report - Getting a Starting Point. And winning a bucket!

I'd had this race on my radar for a couple of months, but after the recent ferritin nose dive and its attendant fatigue issues (see most recent post), I was on the fence about running it. Since my doctor adjusted my herbs a couple of weeks ago, I have seen marked improvement in how I feel, but I haven't been able to tell if I'm feeling genuinely better or just less bad. I definitely can't tell if I'm going to keep improving indefinitely, nor can I tell what will happen if and when I start training "for real" again. And even though I'm finally able to do something resembling workouts, there's been nothing that screams "hey, get yourself in a race so you can kick some ass!!!"

But then this past Monday I was out on an easy run, just a typical 6 mile recovery run, and somewhere in the second half, as I was jogging along letting my mind wander and looking out over downtown Portland, it occurred to me that I was running effortlessly. !!! Hey, wait, is this true?, I thought, Am I really running completely comfortable and easy? Yes. Yes, I was. And in that moment I was flooded with bodily memories of how fun running can be when your body is healthy. I also realized that I genuinely cannot remember the last time running felt truly effortless. It's possible it was late October of 2013, almost a year ago. 

That run made me decide to stop stalling and sign up for the race. It's hard to explain why, but I just wanted to. I'm usually content to wait to race until I have some semblance of fitness, but this time I didn't want to wait. I wanted to get out there. I wanted a starting point for my comeback. 

This race is not a large or super competitive event, but it is a pancake flat 5k. No hills, no trails, and it's not some race distance that I never run. This is a fast course at my best, most often raced distance. There would be no hiding from or excusing the slow time that I was bound to run. 

I decided I was ok with that. The comeback that I'm on right now, provided it keeps going, may take quite a while. Now is not the time to be too proud to race.

The race was up in Longview and was very small. It had that great small town race feel to it. 

As we lined up, the race director made sure to tell us that the roads that we'd be running on were not going to be closed to traffic, and that even though they would have volunteers holding up traffic at intersections, it was our job to be careful and not get ourselves killed. 

Off we went. Within half a mile or so, I had moved my way into a position about 20 meters behind a pack of 5 or 6 dudes, with one considerably faster guy well out in front of them. I settled in there, expecting at least a few of those guys to come back to me later on.

I also discovered that in Longview, just because the roads are not closed during the race doesn't mean you don't run right down the middle of them. Seriously. Right smack down the middle of these huge wide streets is where we ran. There weren't very many cars out, and no one seemed to be pissed off or anything, but still, it was pretty strange. At one point, we were running down a two lane street, with a left turn coming up and a car coming up behind us, and we all edged over and ran right on the yellow line so that the car could pass us on the right. Weird. 

Before the race, I thought that my absolute best case scenario would be 18:30, but that 18:45 was probably more realistic. I was hoping to run low 6's and maybe get a negative split off that pace.

There were no mile markers on the course, but my Garmin gave me a 6:10 first mile. That was a little disappointing to see, because the effort felt about right if not the pace, but that mile was in the past so I just tried to relax and push a little more. 

At about 1.25 miles, there was a very short out and back, and to my surprise I saw that there was another woman not that far behind me. And to me she didn't look very tired. She looked a lot less tired than I felt. Great, I thought, now I really have to get my shit together or I'm going to get passed in the last mile.

Over the next mile, I picked off a couple of guys that had fallen off of the little pack in front of me. My second mile was a little faster by my Garmin (6:04), but nothing spectacular, and I was starting to do the 5k struggle. As we entered the last mile, we turned on to a main street that actually had traffic on it, and were relegated to the thin space between oncoming traffic and parked cars. 

This stretch was 3/4 of a mile long. The only time that 3/4 of a mile seems like a long distance is when it starts at 2.25 miles into a 5k. I caught myself slacking off a couple of times, but managed both times to regain my focus pretty quickly. The pack of dudes was still in striking distance and one more guy had fallen off the back. With less than half a mile to go, I passed the one guy, but I did not seem to have it in me to make a final push to those last 3 guys.

I dug in as the final turn appeared, and tried to will myself to sprint the last couple hundred meters. It wasn't much of a sprint, I'll admit that. It was a slight increase in speed, at best. The announcer started saying something about me being the first female or something and then when I was about 10-15 meters from the finish, he said, "You've got some heat coming down on you", which meant that the last guy I had passed was running me down. Only then did the next gear kick in and I found a little speed to prevent myself from getting nipped at the line. I give that guy full credit for the sneak attack. He was quiet. If the announcer hadn't said something, I probably wouldn't have heard him until he was already passing me.

But then this happened:
I crossed the line about half a step in front of the guy, and since the race was chipped, our names and times popped up on the screen and the announcer read them off. He called out the dude's name and said he ran 19:04, and then he called out my name and said I ran 19:21. Um, what? I hadn't stopped my watch right at the line, but I had taken about three steps past it, put my hands on my knees and then looked down at my wrist to see 19:08 turning to 19:09. I figured they must have read off my time wrong or something. 

After I cooled down I went over to look at the official results screens, and it said 19:21 for me. I printed it out and took my slip over to the timing guys and explained to them that my result was wrong. They were very nice and said they'd look into it, but I checked the results later and they hadn't fixed it. 

Now, just to be clear, this is not something I'm furious about, and it's not something I'm losing sleep over. I know what time I ran, and it's not like I need the official result for anything. But being the person I am, I can't help but wonder about it, because I have no idea what the mechanism could possibly be that would cause only me to magically lose 17-18 seconds on my chip. Both the start and finish were chipped, but it was the system where they don't use mats on the ground. They use some kind of wireless signal I guess, I'm not really certain what the exact technology is. I was standing right behind the first row of dudes, so at most there would have been a second or two lag between gun time and chip time, except these guys (Uberthons) don't even use gun time. They only have chip time. And I was not doing strides off the front of the line before the start (and even if I was, I wouldn't have been doing them 17 seconds before the gun went off). Even if I started my watch a little late, it would only be a second or two. It's just weird. And how could they not notice when they called out our times as we crossed the line together that they were calling out times 17 seconds apart? There was a 20+ second gap both in front of us and behind us, so it's not like it was hectic. 

But anyway, it was a nice race. They didn't really have "prizes" for the winners (other than plaques), which is understandable given the size of the race and the fact that it was a benefit, but they did do this thing where they let the winners pick out one of the unclaimed raffle prizes to take home. I thought that was a clever way for a small race to be able to offer a little something to the race winners without dipping into their race budget. The leftover raffle prizes were all set up on display on a table, and it was a little overwhelming trying to assess which was the most awesome. I felt like I was on a game show. Ultimately I chose the prize with the biggest volume: a bucket (!) filled with... things. Yes, a bucket! Filled with things! We had much fun in the car afterwards sifting through the prizes in my new bucket. There was a giant mug filled with chocolates, a Starbucks card, a candle, a travel mug, a gold styrofoam pumpkin (yes!), a giant bottle of water, a dishcloth...  it was great. (I hope it doesn't sound like I'm being sarcastic about the bucket, because I'm not. The bucket is the bomb. I love the bucket.)

Buckets and timing issues aside, I'm glad I raced. Trying to get back to healthy without the use of IV iron could end up being a long, slow road instead of the quick jump I've gotten used to. I may need to settle for baby steps along the way, and there's a good chance I won't be seeing 17:xx on the clock anytime this season. But that's ok. If I end up with stable iron for the long term, it'll be worth it.