Tuesday, October 4, 2011

the saddest race ever

On Saturday, the Running to Drink posse met up (minus a couple, BOO!) for the Vineyard Run in Grapevine.  Spoiler alert:  we all falsely assumed that it was a 5K.

It was GORGEOUS WEATHER, I was wearing my long-sleeved thumbholes running shirt for goodness sake!  I had been biking and Bikraming all week and taking Higgins out for mini-runs so I felt good about my "training" progress since the week before.  I wanted to run hard and see where that took me.  Unfortunately, I can't remember my exact 5K PR from a race two Februarys ago in San Antonio but I think it was something like 29:20.  My goal is to one day finish under 29:00, which would be lightening speed for this old tortoise.

I love the small races here, it's so much easier to run faster when you aren't weaving in and out of, oh, 35,000 other people (ahem, Shamrock Shuffle) and I started out with a decent pace.  I felt really good on all the hills and just kept pushing my pace as fast as I could without ralphing or having breathing problems. When we got to the end, I looked down at my heart rate monitor and realized that I was hauling some serious butt.  I crossed the finish line at less than 26 minutes, but I just knew that there was no way I'd actually ran quite that fast.  My time from the week before was over 31 minutes!  I saw Adam and at this point I had a couple of tears happening.  Running that hard always makes me feel a rush of conflicting emotions:  disappointment that I gave it my all and was still slow, appreciation that my body can run at all, etc.  I think my first out of breath words to him were something to the effect of "there was no way that was a full 5K, right?" and he said that the announcer was apologizing to everyone because the race was only about 2.75ish miles instead of the 3.1.  He said that the lead cyclist made a wrong turn on the course somewhere so we got a little bit shorted.  I was so disappointed because I was still running pretty close to PR pace, and either way, I would have most likely broke 30:00, which is always an accomplishment for me.  What a bummer!

Our next 5K on the schedule is 10/29 so I guess I'll go for the new PR then, but this one was a little bit of a heartbreaker.  Luckily the Mimi's Cafe Strawberry Lemonade Mimosas that I had with brunch smoothed over the disappointment.

1 comment:

  1. I still can't believe this! Not to mention, the crappy wine pours and the shirts were just ugly. Next one will be better!

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