enkephalin
Cool Runner |
 posted Nov-25-2007 07:02 PM
  
Seattle Half-Sunshinathon, 2007.Well, what can top a Boomer pre-race meet-up, including a special guest appearance by a famous Boomer? Well certainly not the actual race.  Left to right: Ironman Frank (friend of Tet), mariposai, Tetsujin My goals were, in optimistic order first:
1) Run sub 2:08 (my McMillan prediction), ha ha ha
2) Set a new PR, sub 2:11:07, should be possible, based on above, right?
3) Set a new course record, sub 2:21. Ok, at least that, please!!
4) Have fun, chica! Temperatures were hovering around 4C Sunday morning outside our house, as was the fog. During the drive over to Seattle, I spooked myself several times on the highway when I could not see any cars in front of me, nor any overhead lighting, the fog was that dense. Thankfully, by the weirdness that is innate to fog, there was none in Seattle itself. I got up at 5:15 in order to eat, drink and the other in plenty of time to get to the race start by 6:15am. This provided my security blanket of having a parking spot close to the 1) starting line and equally important 2) potties. I spent most of the pre-race time, like a lot of other people around me, napping in the car. I was looking out for Econo, her tall friend, and two of my friends from the Eastside, but with 7,000?? plus runners, it was a lost cause at best. It was still dark at 6:30am so I took some photos of the full moon and the space needle. We were off promptly at 7:30, if not a minute or two ahead of schedule and it took me 4 minutes to cross the mat, just like last year. I thought I should try to move further up in the pack before the start, but it was just too tight, and I didn’t want to annoy a huge bunch of people with my elbowing. It was slow, it was crowded. I did not feel like expending a lot of energy on fancy footwork to get around people. I just hung out with the gang and hoped my splits wouldn’t be too outrageously slow. Mile 1 10:12
Mile 2 9:53
Mile 3 10:11 During mile 3 there is this big climb up a highway ramp, which then veers to the east. I could see at least ½ a mile ahead, at the stream of runners, and it looked as though they were all being pulled along a conveyor belt, with a little bit of bobbing here and there. It reminded me of some ad for the future, a future without cars but with people shuttling around on re-tooled people causeways. Mile 4 10:23
Mile 5 10:50 (weird, it was mostly flat here…)
Mile 6 10:22
Mile 7 10:20 The pack didn’t really thin out till, oh, say mile 6? I definitely remember there being more elbow room last year. I suppose with perfect running temperatures and windless air and sunshine on its way, no one could excuse themselves from the race this year. I was just trucking along, at what felt like ever so slightly faster than training pace, enjoying the perfect running conditions. Every mile seemed to be coming in at over 10:00 minutes, so I figured with the big hills in the second 6.5 miles it was pretty hopeless to shoot for a 2:08 (ha ha), but maybe I will think about that goal number two again in a little while, say at mile 10. I did some complicated math (ok, sub 2:11 is exactly sub 10:00 minute/miles, so at mile 10, that is 10 x 10, wow, an even 100 minutes, but hey, what time is that anyway?). Brain function is obviously not great when I am running. So I decided if I was only 3 minutes over 1:40 at mile 10 (at the end of most of the hills), I would try to push the last 3.1 and gain those 3 minutes back by running 9 minute miles. I got a big kick out of finally seeing someone I knew, a young woman that escorts her boyfriend’s daughter to the school bus stop every morning. She was manning a Gatorade stop, so I specifically ran up to her for a cup. She seemed delighted and hopefully not too surprised to see me running. Then the hills started. There is that one, called Galer? I believe. I power walked that one, it is really short and I was the same speed as most of the people around me running it. The rest of the hills, even steep ones, I ran. The next few miles went through the nicest part of the race course, the arboretum. Everyone was eerily silent during this stretch. There were lots of potholes on this road. I kind of zoned out here and forgot where I was, because when my nose started running heavily, I employed my patented Snot FlingTM maneuver, a crafty execution of wiping my nose drippings onto my thumb and index finger and flinging “it” in a graceful arc forward of where I am running. Normally this happens on my solo runs a few times without any thought. I kind of woke up at this moment in a state of panic hoping no-one had seen what I had just done. But just 10 seconds later the lady, I mean woman, in front of me does her patented Large Gob SpitTM maneuver and I felt much better. But then I started to agonize about whose trademark de-phlegming is more morally depraved. Miles 8 to 10 passed uneventfully while analyzing this conundrum. Mile 8 10:44 Galer hill
Mile 9 9:54
Mile 10 9:40 Somewhere around mile 9 I got it into my head that I could still break my PR, if I ran about 9:10? pace the rest of the way. I kept vacillating on two modes of thinking; either push the pace to 10K race pace and set a PR, or hey woman, there really is no way to break it, so relax and have fun. During one of my “hey, you can do it” modes, special Boomer guest caught up to me, or I caught up to him, or he just appeared out of the heavens, and I told him I was going to push till the end. I really should have bailed at this point and run the rest of the way in with him, since he appeared to be limping. I felt bad about that, but at the time I still thought I had a chance. I finally gave up at mile 12 when I could see the tiny numbers on my watch and do the math properly and realized I was going to be about one minute over my goal # 2. Mile 11 9:32
Mile 12 9:30
Mile 13 9:20
0.1 1:00 Final: 2:11:57 That’s my third 2:11 something this year. Grrrrrr. At least I’m consistent.
But I had fun. It was a really nice day to be running. And from my later splits I know that had 6,000 people not been in front of me today, that sub 2:11 could have been mine.
[This message has been edited by enkephalin (edited Nov-25-2007).]
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