VA 4 Miler Recap!
I never posted my race plan here but it was because I ran out of time, not because I didn’t have one! Going into race day, weather underground was predicting this:
Time | Temp | Feels like | Dew Point | Humidity |
8a | 69 | 71 | 67 | 96% |
9a | 72 | 74 | 69 | 89% |
Coach Billy and I dug into my 10 miler results (pretty much the same course) and I learned all about gap pace. These were my results from the 10 miler.
| Mile | Pace | Gap | Difference |
1 | 13:18 | 13:30 | -12 |
2 | 14:57 | 14:24 | 33 |
3 | 15:37 | 14:52 | 45 |
4 | 15:42 | 15:42 | 0 |
| Total | 0:59:28 | 0:58:28 | 1 min 6 sec |
And finally, this is the plan we came up with!
| Pace | Gap |
1 | 15:16 | 15:28 |
2 | 15:31 | 14:58 |
3 | 15:13 | 14:28 |
4 | 13:58 | 13:58 |
| 0:59:58 | 0:58:52 |
My goals for this race were:
My A goal is to finish in under an hour. While I was at the beach I found out that my 60 year old Godmother walked it in under an hour so the pressure is on lol! Also, while the 10 miler is on a slightly different course I crossed the 4 mile mark of that at right at an hour last year. The only difference is the last .25 miles so I think it should be pretty doable as long as all goes well.
My b goal is less than 1:07:00. That’s my husband’s PR and the jerk doesn’t even train he just runs this race every year and I need to beat him!
C goal is a course PR. That’s 1:15:00 and from the year I had bronchitis and had only done couch to 5k. So pretty confident in that goal.
Friday night, I remember that I’m supposed to make a sign for a friend of mine who was running the 10. Originally we were going to staple it to a pole on the course but I found another friend who would be spectating at mile 5. I texted her and we were set to meet at 6:30am Saturday morning before the road closed. This shouldn’t have been an issue. The race started at 8am and this would put me at the start of the 4 miler at 6:45am. I like to get there 2 hours early but this year I decided only 1 hour early was fine.
WELL! After we dropped the poster off at 6:45am because we were running late, my husband decides he wants a coffee…. Starbucks was 15 mins out of the way so I did the classic thing wife and said “whatever, that’s fine.” To which he took at face value and didn’t understand why I was upset at 7am when we were still in the Starbucks line. Next time I will clearly communicate.
Starbucks took FOREVER! Okay they took 5 mins but then traffic was bad getting to the start line and we had to park half a mile away and we get to the start line at 7:30am right when they are making the first call for runners to line up. Now it’s important to know, I am a rule follower. I don’t care if I’m literally going to try and be the last person in line, I line up when they say line up. Those are the rules! I hadn’t stretched yet and recently I learned that my PT stretches are absolutely still necessary. So I found a tree and half way did the first or 3 stretches. Then they call again for runners to line up. So we get to the corral (it’s a self-corral system where you line up behind the right pace card). And as we are standing there, I used my husband’s arm for balance and did the other 2 stretches.
I was so nervous at this point. My husband tried to calm me down by telling me that “this is just the 4. You weren’t this nervous last year when you did the 10.” That made things worse. I didn’t know why I was nervous but I never doubted that I was going to finish. So hearing this “reassurance” from someone who hadn’t trained, doesn’t care about running and was most likely going to beat me, didn’t help one bit. I honestly don’t know if anything would have helped though, I was pretty far in my head.
Then we started seeing people we knew and I had to fake a happy face. Asking them how they are doing, wishing them luck “Oh you’re doing the 10! I did that last year – you’re going to kill it!” and “This is your first year? The farm basket hill is absolutely as bad as they say, but it’s so much fun!” I’m not sure when I stopped faking it but at some point I got out of my head and just in time. They played the National Anthem, and the assisted participants started. 5 mins late, we were off.
At this point I feel like I should mention that the weather forecast LIED to me!! It was 74 degrees at 6am when we left our house. I’m not sure what the temp was up to at 8a when we started but it was 83 when I finished. I also had pretty specific pace targets so I had written them on my arm in sharpie so that I didn’t forget.
Mile 1 – Target 15:16 – Actual Pace 15:10. I started off at what I felt was pretty easy, but every time I looked at my watch, it was in the 13 -14 min rage (even when I was walking.) Also, my husband was still with me and even he thought it felt easy. I knew that I needed to slow down though. So I did. It took about half a mile until I saw the first 15min pace on my watch. My intervals for the whole race were 60seconds running 30sec walking. I felt great, and even though I was pretty close to my targeted pace, I was starting to get hot.
Mile 2 – Target Pace 15:30. Actual Pace 15:53. The first half of mile 2 is still downhill and the 2nd half is where the “Farm basket” hill starts (it finishes right at the end of mile 3 btw). So for the first half of mile 2 I picked up the pace a little. I knew that my effort should be slightly harder than mile 1 even though my pace was supposed to be slower, because the hill was going to eat a lot of that time in the 2nd half of the mile. I was holding pretty steady around that 15:10 from mile 1. Then the hill. I swear my intervals would ding for me to walk as soon as there was a break in the hill and it was dinging for me to run at the worst parts. I told myself “I don’t care how slow you go. Just run when it dings and run your intervals. Forget the pace just keep going.” That mentality lasted until mile 3. I looked at my watch and doing some very bad math decided that I wasn’t that far off from my target pace since I finished the first mile a little faster. (Now looking at it from a birds eye view I realize that 15:53 minus 6 seconds is 15:47 and is pretty much not on target lol).
Mile 3 – Target Pace 15:13 Actual Pace – OUCH – 16:31. That whole “Just keep running.” Mentality wore off quickly. I caught up with the guy from my job that signed up for the 10 miler after looking seeing my Instagram post. My phone dinged to run as I said hello and he was walking so I didn’t want to be rude. I walked through that interval to chat with him and see how he was doing. He did great btw! But at mile 3 in the middle of the worse hill, he was feeling it as much as I was. My phone dang to run again, and I asked if he wanted to run with me but he said not now. That walk break was a mistake. My legs didn’t want to run up that hill and I was hot and didn’t have the mental strength to make them run up the hill. I finished that run but from that moment on it was spotty at best. I ran through some of the runs, but I also walked through some of them. About half a mile in, I passed the first elite coming back for the 10 miler (the 10 is an out and back.) I usually pass the first elite runner right at the 2-mile mark, so I was kind of excited to have made it a half mile further before seeing the first one. It was a tight finish too. There was 3 of them and they were so close to each other, I thought “Surely one of them is going to trip and it’s going to be ugly.” But that didn’t happen.
Mile 4 – Target Pace 13:58 Actual Pace 15:44. If I have any regrets from the whole race it was mile 4. The plan was to stick as close to 13:58 for the first quarter mile and then dig deep for the rest. As soon as my watch beeped to tell me that I had finished mile 3, I looked at my total time 47:34. I knew to hit my A goal of less than 1 hour, I’d have to run a 12 – 13 min mile (now that I can do the exact math 12:25). My fastest mile to date is 12:52 and that was just back in August. So shooting for a mile that fast on a hilly course in hot weather after I had just put in a great deal of effort on 3 previous miles, just didn’t seem smart. I knew my A goal was dead, but I also knew that barring a serious injury or act of God, I was going to meet my B goal. I struggled to hit that 13:58 pace and when the quarter of a mile mark hit, I didn’t dig deep at all. In fact I did the opposite and I slowed down to what felt comfortable. At the half mile mark, I thought “What am I doing right now?!” and I picked up the pace back to a hard effort. Not the hardest effort but still an effort that I couldn’t talk through. Of course once I saw the finish line I popped on my Andy Grammer song and I blew through it. I always wonder what the spectators think when I sprint through the finish line like that - “clearly that girl did not run the whole race at that pace if she’s finishing now.” At least that’s what I think “If I could just run a whole race at this pace, I’d be breaking tape!”. Either way, I felt great. I grabbed my half a banana and walked back to the finish line to cheer for my husband who finished in 1:09:32.
I thought about it in the car and I realized for some reason, I like that race so much that I think it’s impossible for me to walk away feeling bad about my performance. I didn’t do my best here, but I survived those hills. They were challenging and honestly they get the best of everyone. We drove the course the other day and my car struggled there. But looking back on it now that I don’t have the warm and fuzzies and can see things a little more objectively, I could have done better. I’m happy with my 1:03:48 time – my PR for the 4 miler was 1:15ish so I PRd by around 11 mins – that’s nothing to turn my nose up at. But that 1:15ish time is from 2 years ago before I knew what training was. I’ve come a long way since then and I should have been able to at least knock out at least a 1:02:00. I wish I had just been a little more mentally tough on the hill, and I wish that I had fully stuck to the plan for mile 4.
I have no race photos from this one, but the only camera I saw was at mile 3 when I was not doing so hot so maybe that’s for the best.
. As fun as the day was, it was probably a little more active and long than a day before race day should be. I got home at like 9pm. By the time I ate and did my yoga it was 11p. The good news is, that after a late night Thursday and a long day Friday, I went right to sleep and probably had some of my best sleep in a while.
