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.