Spring It On Half Marathon 2021

Back in the day, I spent three years trying to break 6:00 in the mile, and finally decided to give it one last shot before letting it go for a while. Which, of course, is when I finally managed it. I was kind of feeling the same way about this elusive sub-1:30 half; there is something especially frustrating about trying and failing to achieve a goal you know you can accomplish.

The weather was pretty perfect for running. Sure, it’s always windy at Shore Road, but how bad could it be when the forecast looks like this?!

That said, I was a bit wary since I had decided to give the Endorphin Speeds another shot, despite the fact that I wore them for the debacle that was the Icebreaker Half. I think the foam just doesn’t react well to super cold temperatures, because it felt like a totally different shoe this time around.

Luckily, I found parking pretty close to the start — I had been worried about that, since street parking in this city is a general nightmare. As a result, I had time for two bathroom trips. It felt like another step in the return to normalcy since those bathroom trips involved a porta potty rather than indoor facilities. There was, however, only a single one, and that made me feel super rushed because a line was forming outside, so that wasn’t great. I knew the weather was as good as it could get; now I just needed my stomach to behave, and it didn’t seem that excited about it.

But I did get in two trips, so that helped. A little. And to make up for the St. Patrick’s Day Half, instead of starting last, I started first. (This wasn’t intentional; it seems like whenever the call goes out for us to line up at the start, nobody wants to be at the front. I didn’t necessarily want to be there either, but I did need to toss my heat sheet, and that’s where the trash can was.)

Since it’s a pretty narrow course at the start, we were sent off one at a time. Talk about anti-climactic! I knew I war running a race, but it didn’t feel like it at all, so I overcompensated because I thought I couldn’t possibly be running as fast as I should… and then I looked down at my watch and saw 6:17. Oops. Thankfully, I caught that pretty early and pulled back in time for it not to do any damage.

The course was four out-and-back laps. The race website said that it would be three laps, so I was expecting them to be a little longer, but this is technically preferable despite the added hairpin turns, because if there is a headwind one way, it’s broken up more. (Turns out there was a little headwind on the way back; what even is that?) But the 5K turnaround was earlier than the HM turnaround, and the finish line was a bit past the HM turnaround at the starting end, so I got all confused and couldn’t tell whether the course was measuring long on my watch. This kept my brain very occupied. I thought I needed to run a 6:45 average pace if the course measured 13.3, and I was moving a little slower than that, which was kind of distressing.

Then, halfway through my third lap, I had the brilliant idea of checking my watch at one turnaround and again at the other end. It took about eleven minutes, and the clock time was 1:07, which meant that technically, I should be able to make it. Technically. But I’ve miscalculated things like this before (miscalculations are kind of my specialty), and it would really, really suck to have such a perfect day and blow it, so that kind of lit a fire under my ass, which is very obvious from my splits.

It was enough. It was more than enough. Garmin only recorded 13.13 miles (which is shocking) in 1:28:53, 6:46/mi.

Officially, 13.1 miles in 1:28:52, 6:47/mi. 1/19 OA, 1/5 F. I mean, there were only nineteen people in the half, but I beat eighteen of them, which is hilarious particularly because I had no idea about that during the race. (There were 5K runners who started with us, as well as a couple of later 5K waves, so it was hard to keep track of who was running what.)

That’s a PR of exactly one minute. This means I get to do something I haven’t done in a very, very, very long time, and play the McMillan prediction game! It’s sure to be quite amusing, given my lack of raw speed in shorter distances, but here we go.

1mi — 5:31.8
5K — 19:12 (6:11/mi)
4mi — 24:57 (6:14/mi)
5mi — 31:50 (6:22/mi)
10K — 39:52 (6:25/mi)
15K — 1:01:46 (6:38/mi)
10mi — 1:06:38 (6:40/mi)
30K — 2:09:50 (6:58/mi)
FM — 3:07:01 (7:08/mi)

Yes, indeed, these are funny! The 15K and 10mi seem the most realistic to me; the only reason I’m discounting the 30K and FM is because in the past, when I’ve done a pre-marathon 30K, my pace in the latter turned out to be match my pace in the former, and the idea of me running a marathon at a sub-7:00 pace is just too ridiculous for words. Though I suppose I will have to, at some point, if I’m to break three hours. That’s also hilarious.

This is, notably, the first half marathon PR I have ever run (and I have run quite a few of them over the past decade) for which I did not wear my magic shoes. Don’t get me wrong: I still adore them and mourn the fact that they’re no longer available, but it’s nice to have empirical evidence that it actually is possible for me to manage a PR without them. And no, I do not feel like I cheated my way to a PR by wearing plated shoes: I’ve been running in various plated shoes since 2018, and this is the first time I ran a PR in one of them, so I consider myself a non-responder. I could have done this in any shoe.

It feels weird to attribute a success to myself rather than an external factor. Of course, there were external factors: the weather was amazing, but that isn’t an external factor I can control. Maybe it helped that I was able to wear gloves instead of mittens so that when I grabbed a water bottle, it stayed in my hand instead of dropping to the ground instead. That meant I was able to take a gel; my stomach wasn’t thrilled, nor was my brain, but maybe it did help from a physiological standpoint.

But if all things aligned to allow me to have a good race, I’ll take it. Not going to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Queens St. Patrick’s Day Half Marathon 2021

Remember how 2019 was the Year of the Half Marathon for me? I think 2021 is going to be the Year of Chasing Sub-1:30. Which is ridiculous, considering I’ve already done that, but at this point we can probably just attribute that race to some sort of fluke in the space/time continuum, or something.

Anyway. Spoiler: the weather on the day of this race was not perfect, like it was the week prior. In fact, I initially wore shorts, but then I looked at the forecast before leaving the house and saw wind chills in the teens, so I changed to tights. (The compression web threading on those tights is green and yellow, which I suppose made them thematically appropriate. Unfortunately, said threading also contributed to a lovely little chafing spot on the back of my left knee. And it was not the sort of chafing you discover as a surprise in the shower after the fact; I felt it during the whole race, and it was not a pleasant experience.)

Choosing these shoes was actually not as difficult as it would have been for an indecisive person like me if this weren’t a St. Patrick’s Day race. I mean, they’re green.

I had apparently elected to start in the 8:30 AM wave (I forgot this because I registered so long ago), and with the way races are staged these days, parking and bathroom lines aren’t really such an issue, so I arrived with plenty of time to park, take a long walk to the bathrooms, get back to the car to shed my layers, and then head to the start. Except that I had to make an unplanned detour on the way for another bathroom stop — I didn’t want to risk banking on the hope that it would all just be okay once I started running. As a result, I didn’t make it to the start until after the horn sounded (assuming there was a horn); I was running towards the start line when the racers were already streaming the other way. So much for a time trial start: I was the very last person in the wave to cross the mat. Thank goodness it wasn’t a Sri Chinmoy race, and that elitefeats using chip timing!

Because I started in the very back, I didn’t really have to worry about getting lost on this maze of a course. I probably didn’t need to worry anyway — it was very well-marked — but it also felt more like a race than it would have had I started in the front, because I spent the first couple of miles chasing people down. The course was four laps of this, and by the time the first one was done, I could only see three or four people in the lead pack ahead of me, one of whom was a woman. (Turns out there was a lead pack ahead of them, but they were so far ahead I had no idea they even existed.) I passed all of them during the second lap, too, which I thought put me in the lead overall, which was definitely weird, but whatever. I could already tell this was not going to be a PR, not unless my watch measured the course short, and that was definitely not going to happen.

Though it turned out not to matter what the GPS was going to do, because pretty much exactly at the halfway point, my digestive system decided to stage a mutiny. (I’m afraid to think of what it would have done had I not taken the time for that extra bathroom stop before the start!) One of the guys I’d passed wound up passing me back, and I couldn’t do anything about it because I was really just trying not to keel over and die. Which would be amazing if it was due to running so hard that it brought me into the pain cave… not so much when it’s because my stomach hates me. I slowed down a tad, but at least I managed to keep it pretty consistent.

Garmin recorded 13.23 miles in 1:31:16, 6:54/mi. Which is a slower pace than my watch showed for the New Year’s Day Half Marathon, but since that one measured 13.32, my official finish time usurps that race as my third-fastest half ever. By eleven whole seconds. (I checked my watch at 13.1 miles, and it read 1:30:26. Very irritating.)

Officially, 13.1 miles in 1:31:14, 6:58/mi. 6/82 OA, 1/37 F, and 1/5 open females. It’s so anticlimactic to win races with waves like this. Not that I’m complaining about it, per se! It’s just… weird.

To say that I’m pleased with this time would be a huge overstatement, because I missed sub-1:30 again. But since it was cold and windy, I guess I’m not surprised. At least it was a step in the right direction, which, okay, was not hard to do at all after the shit show that was my last half marathon! It doesn’t seem like I’m ever going to get a day when the weather and my body align to get that sub-1:30, though. It is getting very, very annoying.

And now I get to choose between the Flushing Meadows Park wind tunnel and the Shore Road wind tunnel for my next attempt. What a choice…

Sri Chinmoy 10K 2021

Writing race recaps is weird these days, because it feels as if I’m writing a recap of a time trial, which seems like a strange thing to do. But since it technically was a race for which I paid real money to have an accurate, certified course… I guess I feel compelled to have it on the record.

Not that it really deserves to be there, or anything. I actually had no idea whether I’d be able to pull off a PR, because the month prior was so filled with snow and ice that I couldn’t do any real workouts off the AlterG, given my preference to avoid slipping and breaking something, as a result of which I didn’t really know what sort of shape I might be in. And I do not run in well in cold weather, either, so there was that.

Though this race was postponed from February 14 (see abovementioned weather disasters), and unlike the originally scheduled date, February 28 turned out to be fairly decent from a racing perspective.

Too bad Flushing Meadows Park is always a wind tunnel no matter what! But all things considered, it wasn’t too bad.

It still irks me that Sri Chinmoy races don’t use chip timing — especially when the COVID measures mean that you’re given a particular spot to start, and unless you’re literally in the first row, it’s going to add some time. I suppose I’d be really, really mad about that if I missed a PR by a second or two, but since my grand plan was to go out as close to 6:30 as I could and hang on until I blew up, I didn’t think that would be much of an issue.

The only plated shoes that even kind of work for me… because they don’t have a ridiculous stack height

There was a grand total of nineteen people in my 10K wave. I was in the fourth row, which means there should have been at least nine people in front of me, but I think there were only five. And only one was a woman. I assumed that she was seeded ahead of me because she had given a faster predicted finish time, so I felt no pressure to try and “win.”

I’m soon going to be able to run this course in my sleep without getting lost

Sure enough, she jetted out at the front. And then another woman zoomed past me. But my legs didn’t seem interested in my 6:30 plan — they seemed to want to run 6:40 instead. So I decided to do that for the first lap and see if maybe they’d want to wake up for the second one. Didn’t seem to matter in terms of placement, though, as I passed both of those women about halfway through the first lap. There was a guy running right behind me (until he left me in the dust with a couple of miles to go), and I could hear only him, so I wouldn’t even have known if one of them caught back up to me.

I went into this assuming my watch would measure the course as 6.3 miles, which is why I chose 6:30 as my pace: 6.3 miles at 6:30 would net me a faster finish time for 6.2 miles than the 10K time trial I did in December. It annoys me to have PRs with asterisks after them.

It looks like I’ll have to keep being annoyed. Either that, or just keep running this pace for another seven miles and get a HM PR out of it. Doesn’t that sound like a fabulous plan??

At least I ran pretty even splits. Garmin recorded 6.31 miles in 42:10, 6:41/mi. On that day, in those conditions, I felt like I could have kept it up for another few miles. If I feel the same way when I’m actually running a HM, I will consider it a miracle.

Officially, 6.2 miles in 42:09, 6:47/mi. 5/49 OA, 1/21 F, and 1/14 F0-49. I mean… only a minute slower than my goal. Oddly, I’m really not that bothered by it, because it is slower than I wanted, but honestly faster than I expected. Seems like that’s turning into the story of my life.