RBC Race for the Kids 10 Miler Recap
Well, the day finally came to see if I could complete a race with really poor training. Including this race and my several B races, I ran a total of 101.15 miles since April 29.
The answer is yes, but barely.
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I had a terrible night’s sleep before the race, probably because I tried to go to bed too early. I think the most restful sleep I got was the 10 minutes between my first alarm and my second alarm
Anyway, I got up and got ready to go by 6:30, made it downtown by about 7am, and walked across the street to the race start area. I dropped my bag and wandered around for a while until it was time to get in the start corral. It was self-seeded, and I lined up behind the “12:00” and ahead of the “Walk”
I decided to try to hold my intervals to 30 run/45 walk for the first 5 miles, and then reevaluate. I was able to keep up with that for the most part, except for running the downhills and the walking a lot of the uphills (of which there were too many!) I switched to 30/60 at the 5 mile marker because I was having more and more trouble making it to 30 seconds of running and hoped that longer walk breaks would help.
Unfortunately, I also decide that this was a good time to eat the packaged waffle I had in my pocket. I thought the first bite tasted a little off, but attributed it to aftertaste of my gum. But after the the second bite was in my mouth, I saw that the waffle was moldy! I spit out the bite in my mouth, and rinsed and spit a few times with water from my handheld. Due to a lack of trash cans, I had to walk the next half mile with my handheld dangling off my left hand (it’s normally on my right hand) and an inedible waffle and wrapper in my right.
Once I finally got rid of the trash and got organized again, I was able to make up a lot of lost time in mile 5. But then it started raining again (it had rained a bit in mile 3, but it was refreshing then) and it came down pretty hard for a bit. Adding to my problems, it turns out the particular pavement on that road gets slippery when wet. Not so bad that I felt like I was going to fall when walking, but if I tried to run, I could feel my foot slide a little when I pushed off.
I finally got to a nice long downhill and thought I’d be able to make up some time, but I started getting a muscle twitch or cramp or something in my right calf after about 15 seconds. So it was back to walking most of the time, which was fine because it was back to being mostly uphill again. I ran a little when I saw a photographer about a quarter mile from the finish line (I had to stare at him a bit to make him lift up his camera and do his job—just because a runner is slow doesn’t mean they don’t deserve pictures!!) and then I put on a nice burst of speed for the finish chute.
After I got my medal, I stuck around a minute to cheer on the woman behind me, who I had talked to briefly early in the race before I passed her permanently. It seemed like she was the last finisher, since there was a truck and a cop car following her, but according to the results, the final runner and the final runner pacer did finish sometime after us. The final runner actually won her age group, because she was the only 70-74 woman in the race (there’s a bonus to getting older, I guess)
I got a bottle of water and skipped the food, because they had gross chip flavors (is it so hard to just have an option of plain-flavored potato chips??) I picked up my bag, and tried to get my special plaque for running the three 10 milers this season, but they had run out! I had to send an email to get on the list of people who missed out so they could mail them out (of course, they’d already packed up the list they’d started earlier, which is super rude to slow runners, IMO) I got a picture taken with my medal, and they printed off a copy right there, which was pretty neat, in addition to getting it texted to me.
I switched my shoes and (very slowly) headed to my car and drove home. I ate some food, took a hot bath, and then went out to the Arb with my grandma for an art fair and, as we discovered when we got there, an Iris Sale (this is where our wallets got in trouble
) They had tall bearded iris bulbs on sale for $6 each or 3/$15, which is actually a really good deal, so we got 9 of them, and we we got a free Spuria plant (a short variation of an iris) too.
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During my race, I had a chipmunk run out and chirp at me—it literally waited for me to get to where it was hiding in the woods, ran out into the bike path to greet me, then ran right back into the trees. I also got to see an albino squirrel! He had some kind of big nut or small apple in his mouth and was running off to enjoy it.
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So, onto the next training plan. I have about 500 miles scheduled starting Tuesday and running through Dopey. My next race isn’t until October 6, so I have plenty of time to properly build up to 10 miles this time, and hopefully it also won’t be 65 degrees and 99% humidity for the October race (but who knows, since this same race got cancelled due to heat last year)
