The start was at Northville Downs, a harness racing track, and our first half mile was a loop around the track itself. Fortunately the track was clean of horse manure, but that didn’t stop everyone from making comments about “watch out for the horse poop…”. One thing that I noticed was how many people seemed to gravitate to the high (outer) side of the track – I stuck to the inside edge of the curve, hoping to shave off as many feet as possible.
About a half mile from the track is a somewhat steep hill, followed by two more moderate hills. I don’t know why, but I fretted about those hills all night long prior to the event. I was so concerned about burning my legs up in the first mile and a half while managing those hills that I wouldn’t have any juice left for the remaining 8 and a half miles…. In the end, I didn’t try to charge up the hill – I just took it slow and steady, keeping my eyes on the horizon. After cresting the big hill I was pleasantly surprised that my legs felt great. The remaining two hills were just speed bumps in comparison and I felt great.
I had been planning on bringing my camel-back fluid pouch with me to make sure that I stayed adequately hydrated, but the weather was so cool (50 deg F at the start) that I decided to leave it in my truck. I had also planned on walking through each water station to make sure that I swallowed an adequate amount of water, but I didn’t do that either – I did slow down, and I did try to make sure that I got at least a third of the cup down, but that was it. By mile 3 I was 2 minutes ahead of my race plan and I was not going to give up that time. I felt strong, had a great rhythm going and I just did not want to spoil the mojo. I was cruising. By mile 5, the halfway point, I was 5 minutes ahead of my race plan.
Around that point I realized that even though I had started “slow and steady”, and had successfully traversed the early hills without burning out, I had been strong enough to increase my pace to a comfortable and sustainable rhythm that was faster than I had anticipated my being able to do. My race plan at this point had me running an increasingly faster pace on a mile by mile basis to the finish. Well, it didn’t quite work out that way, but it was all good in the end….
I couldn’t, or more accurately, didn’t want to, increase my pace a whole lot. I was afraid of running out of gas. In addition somewhere between mile 5 and 6 my right hamstring started to tighten up, so I had to deal with that by changing my gait and allowing it to stretch out more. This slowed me down some for the next mile or so. Somewhere around mile 6 they were handing out Goo and even though I had my own I grabbed some and sucked on it for the next mile – so between that and my slowing down a tad, my hamstring seemed to recover and we were good to go for the finish.
When I got to Mile 9 I was cruising very comfortably and wound up running alongside a woman that had to be 60+ years old. I need to point out that she did not appear to be one of those genetically gifted people that are natural athletes who are out there making guys like me look bad… She was out there like me and matching me stride for stride as we went for the finish line – I so hope that I will be able to run distance events when I’m 60+…. (I should note that the oldest person that ran the 10M event was 70 years old, and I only beat him by 11 minutes….).
The last half mile was somewhat interesting – Northville was having an art fair of sorts and on the streets leading into the finish we ran in between all of the artists’ display tents. It was kind of funny in that as we all were sprinting into the finish the artists were starting to open up their displays and so there was a lot of activity as the artists were doing their thing and the runners were dodging the artists as they scurried around. The last quarter mile was a bit odd in that it finished in a park with a sharp and narrow downhill trail that ultimately flattened out and wound its way through the park to the finish line. As I entered the park I was sprinting pretty hard and had no knowledge whatsoever of the steep downhill trail that I was about to turn onto. As soon as I hit the hill I killed my speed; I didn’t want to hurt myself on the hill (I’ve already torn my calf muscle once – I don’t want to do that again). But then once on more level ground in the park the trail was so narrow that it was difficult to pass other runners who were content to jog their way in to the finish line. Oh well…. no biggie.
I wound up finishing with a time of 1:27:24, a full 5 minutes better than my race plan. That calculated out to an average 8:44 pace and I am very happy with that. Room for improvement, and I think that we can!
15 weeks to Chicago!
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