Don’t be fooled by the fact that I ran a race… it isn’t because I’m suddenly miraculously no longer a useless heap of shit. It’s because I needed to run one to give us a baseline of just how useless I am, and the Midnight Run couldn’t really do that since it was at such a bizarre hour. This one was also a bit odd, but 11 AM beats 11:59 PM, even if it does effectively kill the whole day.
I was actually planning to run the first race in this series, because the course was a nice simple out-and-back. But the weather last weekend was awful — cold and horribly windy — so we decided to hold off on it and hope for better weather on a less ideal course.
Foiled.
It was cold. So, so, so cold. I am actually fine running in 25°, but not with a headwind gusting up to 25 MPH. Hence the blue part of the heat map (what a misnomer) … I could barely even run in a straight line, as the wind wanted to blow me into the dirty ice piles at the side of the road. I pinned my bib to my tights, because until after I warmed up, I was seriously considering running the race in my jacket, which I haven’t done in… oh, ten years or so. I wound up changing my mind — it was too hot with the wind behind me, and I’d be freezing my ass off the other way anyhow. If I’d known I was going to run in a jacket, I would have brought a different one! I ditched it at the last minute, and by the time I made it back to the start line from my car, everyone had already lined up. Of course, I don’t belong at the front now, but I didn’t need to be as far back as I was… which meant I actually got to pass people for a change. Except I started so far back, I wasn’t really sure how many women were ahead of me. You’d think the amount of turns would have cleared it up — they went by going the other way multiple times — but I kept losing count.
Being that this was supposed to be telling me how much I suck, I was going to run it by feel. Imagine my dismay when I approached the first mile marker and saw a clock there! I considered not looking at it, but that would have been hard to pull off, so I glanced at it … under 7:00, which, if sustained, would beat the 22:00 I said it would take a miracle to beat. But of course that didn’t happen, because then we turned around. Into the wind. And even if I wanted to draft off someone, I couldn’t; it was coming in from the northwest, which would mean I’d have to tuck in right behind their left shoulder, and that would put me right in the ice piles I was trying not to fall into.
I don’t believe in fighting Mother Nature. You will never win. I tried plugging the stats into the Runworks calculator, but I can’t make heads or tails of the result. All I know is that yeah, I would have run faster without the headwind. Because I wouldn’t say I felt great, but I didn’t feel utterly awful either, so if I hadn’t been running against a wall of wind…
Garmin recorded 3.17 miles in 22:30, 7:06/mi. (That wouldn’t have happened last week without all the crazy turns, I bet.) Officially, 3.1 miles in 22:25, 7:13/mi. 31/747 OA, 3/396 F, 1/50 F35-39. And fingers that were in agonizing pain for many, many minutes afterwards as they began to regain feeling.
I don’t even feel disappointed anymore when I finish a race. I’ve numbed myself to that. There are only so many times you can fall into a suicidal spiral if you’re not actually going to manage to do anything about it. Instead, I just get overwhelmed with disgust, because it is so pathetic that a 5K at slower than my old marathon pace is supposed to be an accomplishment.
It’s been so long since I’ve finished a race and not experienced that. I don’t even really remember what it’s like to actually feel like I’ve achieved something noteworthy, but I miss it so badly it physically hurts. All I’ve managed to do in attempting to get that back is turn myself into a fatter, slower version of myself. (I’m not saying I’m slower because I’m fatter. The slowness came first, so I can’t blame it on the fatness. But it sure doesn’t seem to be helping, and I’d be more amenable to being repulsed by the way I look if I also got something useful out of it, but as it is… I’m just fat and slow. For no reason.)
Running Break 