The Modicum of Restraint

I followed all the advice. Cut my miles down to almost zero. Got the massages. Wore the girdle - I mean, compression shorts.

I even did the hardest thing I've done, running-wise, in a while: I had my marathon number in my grasp, had been able to see how few women were in the field, and returned it to get a number for the half.

While the hardest, that was also the wisest thing I've done in a while. A little-used part of my brain must have found a large club and beaten the rest of my brain into some semblance of submission.

For, as I was struggling through the last part of the half, losing speed, wheezing, and having to concentrate on different parts of my form to ignore the strident voices in my head saying things like "doesn't that view look nice? You should stop there for a while!", intermixed with the one part of "Welcome to the Jungle" that was playing on repeat between my ears, I kept thinking to myself "Thank god I'm not doing the full marathon!"

You see, dear reader, I had initially convinced myself that, whatever race I did, It would be at a (fairly) leisurely pace. "this will be great!" I thought. "I'll bring my camera. Stop for photo ops. Finally look good in a race photo. Maybe I'll even wear a bit of makeup, in case I run near anyone cute."

This is where the little-used part of my brain wisely waded in. Although I was certainly not running a blazing pace, effort-wise it felt like it. So, I'm glad that part stepped in. Although when "----- Gilette, first woman with a time of 3:07:59" came over the loudspeakers, I did feel a serious pang of regret. Until I remembered how sore I was already! Maybe another year.

For those of you who just want to hear about the race, that part starts here.

I woke up around 3:45, checked my email, found a possible rejection for an article I had submitted too long ago, and had a conversation with The Life of The Party about it. That put me in a weird mood, but I resolved to enjoy the fact that I was about to run a race in Hawaii, under better conditions than most of my teammates were going to be experiencing at the Cosme 5k in Brooklyn. Took the obligatory pre-race photo with mini-Ox and headed out the door, making sure that I had stuffed into my sports bra everything I would need or might need during the race. I swear, I don't know heat men do with their stuff!

Drove to the start, hid my rental keys, and went in search for a bathroom. The hotel near where the start was located would only unlock one bathroom in it's lobby, likely to discourage strange running people from wandering around. Not confident that the situation wouldn't be worse near the start (with only one port-a-John, as I later discovered, it likely was), I wandered back over to my car. Unfortunately, it was growing lighter and lighter outside and there were still people parking. Making an executive decision, I went up the hill to an overgrown area, where I used the facilities next to what appeared to be someone's meth cooking kit, breathing in the aroma of something not-so-recently dead. That was creepy. I made sure not to look around too much, having read a fair amount of stories where the looking around would inevitably lead to blue flashing lights and me puking somewhere while police asked me questions. It would have made me miss the start, you see!

Anyway, I warmed up as best I could. My quad felt kind of tight, which worried me, but I hoped it would loosen up a bit in the race, or at least not get worse. The compression shorts were already a bit warm but it was too late for wardrobe switch-outs.
I got to the start a bit earlier than was necessary but was happy about this in the end. As suspected, there was no real starting line and certainly no real attempt at self-ordering based on projected speed. In fact, two seconds after Miss Kona Coffee said "go",someone fell because he/she was much slower and got pushed over by the swell of much faster people behind. This is something I've never understood. When I was slower, I always made sure to stand far back of the front. Even now, when I'm a bit faster, I don't try to get all the way up to the absolute front. It's really dangerous to do this, for the slower person and everyone else. I wish people would see that a minute or two faster on their time does not support the risk of not finishing at all because they were pushed to the ground.

End of rant. So, I start running. I knew I was running too fast, abandoning the pretense of the nice, easy jog I had promised that I would do. I also knew that this was potentially problematic for my quad. But I didn't care. I had my stride back and my quad was loosening up! Either that or my body pumped itself up with so many endorphins that I couldn't feel it. Checking my watch after the first half-mile, I realized that I was going at about a 6:49 pace. Telling myself that I was not in shape for that pace, I forced myself to slow down. However, something else happened within this half mile that was quite strange: I looked around me and didn't see a single woman near me or ahead of me. And I was wearing my contacts! "weird" I thought. "I know that this is a small race (591finishers) and last year's winning time wasn't that fast as finishing times go, but 1:25 is still only to be found in my dreams and not in any race records for me. "
This motivated me not to slow up as much as I would have otherwise. Around mile two, I started chatting a bit with a really nice man who lived in the area. He was trying to qualify for Boston and needed a 1:35 or under, which would be a PR for him. Around mile four, he was able to keep the pace and raise it a bit, while I was already feeling that tired-legs feeling, not a Goidelic sign so close to the start and a direct result of my lack of training. Several times, both then and when I saw him coming the other way on the out-and-back, he encouraged me to speed up and run with him but I was just too out-of-shape to even try. He ended up with a 1:31 something, apparently smashing his PR by more than five minutes. Wow. And he looked great the whole time.
Which is more than I can say for myself. I was gone enough by the turn-around that I thought I was hallucinating when women started clapping and cheering for me. "first woman!" are they crazy?
I had realized by this point that my watch could only be the most basic of indicators concerning pace and distance. Either they grossly mis-measured the course or, more likely, my watch was not getting good satellite locks. I had been worried about this on the training run, when the watch took almost five minutes to locate the satellites. It seems quite implausible that a race with a 17-year history and on the same course as the Hawaii ironman would have made the course too short by over a half-mile.
The course turned around in the parking lot of a shopping center. That was weird, psychologically, because the way it was set up, you couldn't see the turn-around until you were almost on top of it. This is where the marathoners would go out onto the highway and get onto the flat part of the course. I turned around with a wheeze of relief and went back to tackle the return trip. "it's all downhill from the turn-around", Frank Shorter and many others said before and during the race. They must have meant psychologically because, physically, it was not. True to the nature of race advertising, the course was announced as one with only 200 feet total increase in elevation. Well, Baltimore has only a bit more than that on their course and it's known as one of the hillier marathon courses. Similarly, this course consisted in a series of steep, short-ish hills. On the way back, they were pretty brutal for someone without enough training and who had been running primarily in flat Brooklyn. I kept looking at my watch as a rough guide. I have no idea of the accuracy but, when it seemed i was slowing down significantly according to the watch, I would speed myself up a bit. I kept waiting for another woman to pass me. I was going so slowly! A couple of times, I heard footsteps slowly creeping closer and I would think "now's the time....someone intelligently started more slowly and is now kicking into high gear". But, each time, it was a guy who passed me.
We were in the midst of the 10k runners at this point, as their turn-around was closer in to the finish. These were middle-of-the-pack runners, so I spent the time trying to pass as many as I could. At this point in the race, I was holding on to some semblance of a pace with force of will and these sorts of tricks. At around mile eleven, I started getting a lung cramp and coughing that high-pitched cough that warns me of an incipient asthma attack and irritates everyone around me. So, I wouldn't be sprinting to the finish.
And then there was the turn to the finish, less than 200 yards away. When I crossed, I heard the announcer: "with a time of 1:34:16, Sarah Scott from Brooklyn NY is the first woman to cross the finish line for the half."
What!? And how embarrassing that everyone heard my time! That was slower than the first halves of at least the last two marathons I'd run, and I went on to run another 13.1 after that!
But, I wasn't in shape.

Things I've learned: it's really important to be in shape for a race. Compression tights are hot as heck. Even if you don't feel like you've run a good time or a good race, you win if you are out in front. When asked, I will say that I won the Kona half. When asked my time, I will pretend that I have something pressing to do elsewhere. Like trying on more compression tights.

We'll see how the quad feels later this week. Right now it's quite sore but I was also trying to work on it last night.