My legs kept no Pace with my Desire

You might want to sit for a while and grab a coffee for this one. I get its fitting that its so long since the race was so long. :)

************
A Midsummer Night’s Run
August 20, 2011

I met up with a friend at the Running Room and we took the street car over together to the start/finish area. After we checked out bags we met up with a bunch of people from our group. It was funny when we realized we “knew” pretty much all the pace fairies. I got some advice from those who’ve ran this before since it was going to my first 30k ever. Like not just my first 30k race but my first time hitting that distance. Most of us were planning on doing 10 and 1’s and I decided to settle in with Ann. She was the pacer for 3:15 run/walk. The plan was to stay near her for the most of it and definitely use her when it started to get hard.

Finally it was time to start and we all settled into where we wanted to be. I had a quick hello and good luck with Marlene when she passed us to get to a faster start. We started off a bit ahead of our pacer but we knew the path would get really narrow around 5k. In all honesty I don’t remember much for the first 10k. I remember seeing a friend that none of us were sure was going to make it out, getting weird looks from the drivers we passed down on Cherry St.

By 12k we entered the Spit (or better known as Tommy Thompson Park). Before we hit the next water station there was a bridge to cross. It was downhill towards it on gravel. A friend of mine who was running next to me stumbled or something on some loose gravel and it looked like she was going down head first but then she rolled to her side. She was banged up and bloody so another girl and I stayed with her and helped for about 5 minutes. When we started again we had lost our pace group and decided to run together and estimate our 10 and 1’s since neither of us at set our watches for those because planned on running with the pacer. We went around the lighthouse and hopefully got some pictures. I commented that we probably wouldn’t have gotten any from there if we were with the group. LOL.

I had to hit the port o potty for the first time during a race around the 21k water station. I was still feeling good at this point. By 23k I was feeling really hot and tired. I had realized that I was off my nutrition plan and that kind of threw me. The last bit of turnaround had changed since part of the route in Ashbridge’s Bay was fenced up so we had to run along the boardwalk for a touch. By this point it was dark. And by 26k I was feeling really done. I was taking lots of walk breaks from here one and I kept telling the girl I was with to go on ahead. She had us running a bit more than half a km and then we could walk some more. By the end we were going 3 and 1’s to just get to the finish because I was holding back tears and wanted to walk off around 28k. We got the finish and I really don’t want to see that picture because I was trying to not bawl my eye out so I’m sure it’s bad.

Ann (our pacer) was actually waiting for us at the finish line. She wanted to make sure that we and my friend that we helped made it in. Some of my other friends found me and I literally felt like crap. I wanted nothing more than to just sit on the ground and not move for a bit. No one would let me and honestly if this happens again I’ll tell them to piss off since once I did get to sit for awhile in the car ride home I was feeling better.

It was a rough night but I learnt some things about letting things roll and adapting when plans change. I learnt that if I need to stop for a minute or two and set up a new plan in my head it’s ok. I need to work a bit more on mental toughness since I will need that to get through adding another 12k to this new distance.

Garmin Time: 3:13:30
Official Time: 3:18:16
Chip Time: 3:17:28
Place: 605/834
Category (Women 20-29): 61/86
Gender Place: 272/432

Pictures to follow(well maybe not the finish line one)