Starting the year out with a huge PR doesn’t bode well. At least, it didn’t last year, not for me… since I got injured four days later and have been injured pretty much nonstop since then.
So, even though I ran the Prospect Park loop in 24:51 last year, I predicted my finish time today as 25:30. It’s kind of hard to run particularly fast when you’re semi-hobbling, you know?
I wasn’t actually sure whether I was going to do this at all… if my ankle felt like it did on Monday, it wouldn’t even have been a question; I could barely walk since it hurt to put weight on that leg. It did get somewhat better, but I still decided to drive to the start instead of running the two miles there and back, so as to reduce the mileage on my uncooperative leg.
Turns out, I did get a two-mile warmup. I was lucky and found a parking spot right on Prospect Park Southwest, near the entrance closest to the start. The plan was to stay in the car until close to my handicap time (10:19), but nature interfered. I really needed a bathroom. For some reason, I thought there was a porta potty at the top of Center Drive, but when I reached that spot, there wasn’t one. I remembered that there was one at the other end of Center Drive, maybe half a mile away… so I decided to run down there. Only to learn that this porta potty had no lock on the door, and while it wasn’t as bad as it could have been, porta potties are pretty gross. So I decided to keep going for another quarter mile or so to use the bathroom at Lakeside — indoors! With sinks, and toilet paper, and everything!
A lovely plan, but then I had to make a dash back to the start line. I arrived there at 10:17:44, which gave me just enough time to shed my jacket (my down jacket, which I was wearing over my running jacket and a long-sleeved hoodie — running in that was super duper fun) before my handicap set off. I have no idea how many people were there at all — I just started to run. And then I finally took assessment of my ankle. It hurt, yeah, but I was pretty sure I’d be able to make it through another 3.35 miles; I just probably wouldn’t PR. So I figured I wouldn’t even bother to try.
It’s not bad, as far as things go… the splits are very close to what they were last year. Obviously a tad slower, since it’s thirty seconds off overall, but the pattern is the same, so I chalk it up to the topography. It’s annoying that I couldn’t give 100% to this, since I’m pretty sure I could have PRed had my body cooperated, but come on… when does my body ever cooperate?!
Let’s just say that after I finished, I was really, really glad that I had driven and wouldn’t need to run home. I have no clue what happened to my stupid leg, I really don’t, but it hurts and it’s not funny and it needs to go away.
But! I was under the impression that everyone got medals for this race; apparently, that isn’t the case. I got one last year (I think I was fifth female), but I can’t go into Knights of Columbus so I wasn’t aware that not everyone got one. It seems that every year the awards distribution changes — this year, it was top 25. My overall finish place was #19.
It will be a few days yet before the full results are out, but I do know that my official time matched my Garmin time — so 25:21 for 3.35 miles. Nine seconds off my prediction — am I prophetic, or what? I think that’s around a 7:34/mi pace. Which is also pretty close to the pace required for a sub-1:40 half, so if my stupid, stupid, stupid leg would stop hurting, that would be fantastic.
Running Break 