Hot shower, it's only about 50 degrees out.
Eggs and toast breakfast. 2/3 of my normal.
6AM Drive to Kevin's place in Brooklyn. Very easy drive and someone pulled out of the parking space right in front of their place as we turned the corner. If you've lived in the city, you know how awesome that is.
8:10AM We drive down to the race site. Genine and Lara Drop us off and look for a place to park.
Spend 20-30 minutes waiting on line at the porta-johns. Genine and Lara find us in line. Which is cool Genine wanted to see the start.
Walk up to the boardwalk with about 5 minutes to the starting gun. Maybe less :-)
So I didn't have time to walk the lineup to find Steve and Amy (from swimming group).
GU before the start.
5800 racers and we are lined up behind 4500 of them. The first part of the run was on the boardwalk at Coney Island. There was very little room to get around slower people. The gaps in the boards give you a hypnotic pattern to look at, and there are loose and uneven boards. We only saw one person wipe out because of this but it was certainly on my mind as I was running.
Kevin definitely frustrated by the tight conditions on the boardwalk. He prefers to start out quick. It's nearly 3 miles of running on the boardwalk. Map is below. My pace pod is working with the watch but my HR monitor wasn't working at the start. Probably just too many people with them on and I didn't notice right away. You just hold the watch to the strap for it to sync back up. There were many times along the run where I was getting double readings because of being close to others.
This was my first running only event, everything else I've been has been multisport. My last long run was 3 weeks ago up in New Hampshire and that was about 9 miles. Since then I only fit in 20 miles because of the back issue and tapering. So I didn't know exactly what pace I was going to be able to hold for the distance. I've never run this far before. Kevin's goal was to stay under 2 hours. So we ran with that as the goal. I figured I'd just monitor my HR and how I felt and scale back if it was feeling like too much.
Ocean Parkway run was uneventful. Gu at mile 6.
I'm amazed at how many people are in this. We are going to be surrounded the entire distance.
Our worst mile was between mile 9 and 10 and that was just because we were stuck in serious traffic. We had been compressed into a 2 lane road and it was sloped pavement falling away to the left. We tried to stay on the more even pavement to the far right. We hit mile 10 at about 1:30:00. We were feeling confident about the 2 hour goal but the park was the hilly part of the course and much more congested. I feel that one thing I do well running is holding a pace unless the hill is really big. So I started to work on getting us back below 9 min miles. (the polar watch is really helpful for stuff like this). I looked at my HR, getting bogus readings because of being so close to others with HR straps. Not a big deal, I was feeling really good. Hip Flexors / upper quad area was disliking the downhills but nothing awful.
We crossed the finish at the same time. Genine and Lara were right there. Which was very cool. Thank You Lara for fighting the traffic and getting to the finish.
Results: 1:57:48, 3156 out of 5832.
I felt that I could have kept running. Yet as soon as I stopped running. My legs started to get tight. Guess you need to cool down after a run like that, rather than just stopping. There was no room for that. Stretched out as best as I could.
I had been wondering if I would regret running this event one week after the Bassman Tri. I didn't get to train much this week but I'm glad I did this run. Definitely a confidence booster.
Pictures from the event.
2 comments:
Bravo! great run. I guess you can't say your were over trained. Great time. What could it have been without the crowds?
It's hard for me to say what my time would have been if I was on my own and racing it.
The main reason being, running with Kevin made the 2 hours seem like it was about an hour. If I'm on my own pushing it at what point do I start being aware of the time/distance.
That being said, I believe 8:30 pace would have been doable the entire distance. So about 7 minutes quicker?
Knowing the course would have it's advantages. First 3 miles, very very tough to move around. Once you hit Ocean Parkway, that is when you need to keep it moving, once you hit the park for the final miles it was tight again.
I'm very happy with the race exactly how it happend though. The last 2 weekends have been huge confidence boosters for me. 3+ hours for the Mooseman is no longer a scary idea. Fear had been my motivator all along. I might have to find a new motivator.
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