PPTC Cherry Tree 10 Miler & Relay 2020

For a change, this year, I decided to set a goal of sorts for this race. The Go Hard or Go Home Half Marathon indicated that I am capable of running three loops of the park at a sub-7:00 pace, so I settled on aiming to finish under 1:10. Then I looked at the results from the past couple of years and realized that 1:09 would have been good enough to get me into the top ten females. I don’t like using placement as an ultimate goal, since there’s so much about it that’s out of your control, but 1:09 is better than 1:10 anyway, so I decided to try for that.

And then my PT told me to run 1:08. He may have been joking. As I was when I said that if I was already going to run 1:08, I may as well just run ten seconds faster to beat my PR. I was joking because I do not feel like I am in any way in PR shape, to the extent that I did a (short) speed workout on Friday since I was sure the race was a lost cause.

Especially since it was supposed to be cold. Granted, not as cold as it can be, and has been, for this race in the past… but I really don’t do well in the cold, as I’ve said ad nauseam. I debated over whether to wear shorts, but in the end I just felt so beaten down by the misery of winter that I went with tights instead.

At some point, once I’d defrosted a bit, I felt like I could have been okay in shorts; but I never felt too hot in the tights, so I suppose it was the right choice.

photo by Linda Chan

Especially since this is how I started out — the same way I seem to start out all races these days, wrapped up in a heat sheet. I wore that for a little over a mile, then carried it for a few minutes until passing a trash can in which I was able to dispose of it.

That was after the first time up the hill. Which I took super easy, because A. I was still too damn cold not to, and B. I know that I am not a strong hill runner, so that’s a dumb place to expend all my energy. Of course, the smarter thing to do would be to work on it so that I get stronger on hills, especially since, you know, Jerusalem. And Boston. But oh well. The advantage to running a course with which you are familiar is that it makes it easier to adjust your pacing tactically in ways that suit your strengths and weaknesses.

The mile markers were super confusing; I passed the first one before my watch hit the first mile, and then by the fifth one, my watch was over 5.1. I wasn’t sure what that meant in terms of a PR, but since the Bronx did measure super long, I was just keeping an eye on my average pace with the knowledge that I needed to keep it below what it was in the Bronx. Problem was that I didn’t exactly remember that pace. Oops.

I wasn’t sure how many women were ahead of me, but I was pretty certain it was more than ten. Picking them off gave me something to do, but by the halfway point, I had almost run out of them — except for Karen, and we ended up finishing at the same time. This isn’t because I was so super duper speedy, but because they were so far ahead of me that I had no hope of catching them.

We crossed over the mats at the end of every loop, and the clock read 23:03 when I came through the first time, so I knew I needed to see at most 46:06 and 1:09:09 if I didn’t want a positive split. Works for me, since I was aiming for 1:09 after all, yes??

Third and final time up the hill… photo by Cheer Everywhere

Well. It seems that I am nothing if not obedient, because with a couple of miles to go, I realized that if I didn’t ease up to “just finish in 1:09,” I actually stood a chance of making my PT prophetic and running 1:08. I had checked the difference in elapsed time on my watch and the course clock when I passed it in the first loop, so I knew what it needed to say if I was to PR… and as I approached the finish line, it was ticking perilously close to that. Cue the sprint like a crazy person finish.

It seemed to have been enough, since the elapsed time on my watch — which is generally a couple of seconds over my chip time — matched my previous PR. Phew.

Garmin recorded 10.07 miles in 1:07:52, 6:44/mi.

And just because the splits look a little erratic, I am choosing to take comfort in the Strava GAP. Even though that probably doesn’t mean very much, since somehow there’s variation in it when I run on a track.

But Strava also shows this, which is lovely! (Granted, it’s the first time I really tried to race this. But still.)

As for my “top ten” goal… ha, ha, ha, yeah, no. Of course I’d always prefer a PR over an impressive-sounding placement, so at least I did manage that.

Officially, 10 miles in 1:07:49.8, 6:47/mi. 74/647 OA, 15/304 F, and 6/102 F30-39. It’s technically a PR by 1.2 seconds, but I am choosing not to round up, thank you very much, and will consider it two seconds.

That’s also a faster pace than I ran on this same course in my 5-mile PR, and just a couple of seconds slower than my pace at the 10K PR I ran on a super flat course. I am such an Endurance Monster, it is not even funny.

I don’t really need to play the McMillan prediction game, since the times will be virtually identical to the ones from my previous 10-mile PR! But I did it anyway so that I could compare them with Daniels’ predictions, and I really do think the latter is more suited to my actual abilities, since I’ve gotten close to that marathon time but haven’t beaten it yet; and the shorter distances are just a couple of seconds off my PRs. I think I’ll still with McMillan anyway, though, if only because there is a wider variety of distances from which to choose!

Even though the shorter distances are so ridiculously hilarious, I’d cry if I weren’t laughing.

Go Hard or Go Home Half Marathon 2020

If I had to choose an existing book title for my autobiography, it would be Catch-22. Because my life is a never-ending series of those, two of which are on full exhibition here:

It is no secret that I am, in general, a highly anxious person. Just because that is my default state does not mean it doesn’t sometimes kick into overdrive, which is what it did over the last week since it is one of my least favorite times of the year: tax season. When I am forced to face the fact that I am, essentially, a worthless person, as my lack of earning potential confirms. (Never go to grad school. Total waste of money.) Since running is one thing at which I am semi-decent, I can bury my head in the sand about the aforementioned worthlessness if I run a decent race… except that races cost money, so using them as an antidote for anxiety when the anxiety is spurred by finances is kind of counterproductive. See? Catch-22.

Then there’s the part where anxiety literally makes me feel sick. Being as emetophobic as I am, the last thing I want to do when I already feel like puking is eat… but I have to, if I want to be able to run. (Or so my dietitian tells me.) I suppose this is more of a conundrum than a catch-22, but it’s close enough to qualify. Somewhere in there, we can also fit that for someone with an already-finicky digestive system, this messes things up even more (from a running perspective).

Obviously, none of this helped create the ideal situation for a great race. I’m sure attending a very late-night birthday dinner the evening prior didn’t help either, but I feel like I never come into races with a physical edge; I tend to be stronger at the mental side, since when you spend every second of every day battling the voice inside you that tells you you aren’t good enough, you have lots of practice behind you when it starts screaming during a race.

I know that I am faster than last year, when I ran this race one second slower than the Icebreaker Half. I thought it would be hilarious if that happened again, but I came into this race so mentally drained from the previous few days that I gave up before it even started. (Also, running three 12-milers on the AlterG the week prior probably didn’t help.)

I do not know why I keep running races that are multiple loops of the park. My ITB hates it, and I am not great at hills, so … it’s a mystery.

The weather was pretty decent, although since I apparently now race in shorts in the winter, I needed to wear these bizarre pants to get to the park. (Don’t even ask how long it took me to find a pair of pants that would fit over shoes without having to take the shoes off. That should not have been so difficult.)

I wore these shoes because my post tib tendon was pissed off after I wore them for the Pottstown Half Marathon, and I wanted to see if it had gotten over itself yet.

Good news is that it mostly has, though since I’m pretty sure the shoes were just coincidental, it doesn’t really mean anything.

I picked two women as my competition before the start; it a bizarre talent that I have. If asked to explain how I choose these people, I really couldn’t tell you, but I’m right far more often than I’m wrong.

As soon as the race started, I could tell it was going to be one of those days when everything felt like a struggle. Fantastic. My first time up the hill was a slog, and to say I was not excited about the prospect of doing that three more times is quite an understatement.

This was around mile 2.5, and I was the lead female. This is on an open course, so you can’t really tell from behind who is part of the race, but when a woman passed me less than half a mile later, I knew she was a participant because she was one of the two women I’d pegged earlier.

And I didn’t even try to catch her, because I was mentally done. It wasn’t like in September, when the first place female ran 1:26; this woman wasn’t running so much faster that I was physically incapable of catching her. It was absolutely mental. Also because I have placed second in this event a bunch of times, so I think I unconsciously believe that that’s what is “supposed” to happen.

There were lots of people out in the park, so there is that! Always nice to see friendly faces. Even if I am jealous that they get to be out enjoying a nice long run while I’m grinding away since, theoretically at least, I am racing.

The mile markers were way, way off. My watch was consistently measuring .15 mile short, but having passed the 13 mile marker on my way to the start, I knew that it would catch up at some point. That point turned out to be after that marker. As in, I passed it before my watch had even hit 13 miles, and then it just kept going… and going… and going. Which was annoying because while it was blatantly obvious I wasn’t going to come close to last week’s finish time, I would have liked to have gotten a little closer than I did!

Well. That was not the most pleasant of experiences.

Garmin recorded 13.29 miles in 1:32:14, 6:56/mi.

Officially, 13.1 miles in 1:32:12, 7:02/mi. 16/139 OA, 2/61 F, and 2/15 F35-39.

I don’t know what’s wrong with the usual “Second Place,” but I guess this is just a nice way of saying, “Close, but no cigar!” Though I should really remember that a year ago, I would have been over the moon with this finish time, because it would have been a PR. I guess it shows some measure of progress that I can run a time like that now while feeling terrible. And it’s not that I’m annoyed with the time: I’m annoyed that I let myself cave mentally. I should know better than that.