Race Report! (Hint: Woooooooot!!!)

The executive summary: I'm back from my five-mile race! I survived! I neither injured myself nor came in last! AND I had fun!! Woot woot woot!

The play-by-play: I woke up well before the alarm went off, a tradition I seem to be carrying over from dog agility shows to race mornings.I finally gave up tossing and turning and rubbing my head (headache again, yick) and got up half an hour earlier than scheduled. The first order of business was to take an Excedrin and check the weather forecast to see if fate was going to goose me again like it did yesterday. The weather report said it was 52° and that the rain was not going to start in earnest until later in the morning. That gave me hope. Then it took me nearly an hour just to shower and dress and get my contacts in. (Hopefully I'll get better at putting in and taking out my contacts before too much longer. Right now I'm just hilariously pathetic.)

I ate scrambled eggs and half a buttered bagel for breakfast and made myself an Elvis bagel to take to the race. One last check of the weather showed that the temperature had dropped to 42° with a wind chill of 35° at the race site. Oh, great. Nothing to do now but laugh, I guess. I loaded the car and headed out at 7:45. It was just "spitting" when I left the house, but the rain picked up about 15 minutes into the drive. It kept toying with me, slacking off for a while only to splat down harder later--but it never even got close to frog-strangling level. On impulse, I pulled into a parking lot a few blocks from the race site where other runners seemed to be congregating. It was too far to schlep my duffel bag, so I left it and all of its contents (most notably my camera) in the trunk. All I had with me were my Elvis bagel and water, my keys, my gel, and my running gloves.

A cold rain was falling, and the wind was helpfully blowing it sideways. I immediately followed John Bingham's advice: "And this next sentence is the most important sentence in the entire book: When you get to the race site, immediately get into a portable-toilet line. I'm not kidding. Do not stop to talk. Do not look around for friends. Make a direct line for the portable toilets." There were 8 port-a-johns and about 50 people already in line for them. While in line, I heard a lengthy discourse about sports bras and an important fact I had not thought about--this was a "hilly" course, at least by Midwestern standards. Uh-oh.

I still had almost an hour before the race started even after standing in the potty line, so I nosed about looking for someplace to get out of the wind. Fortunately, the race-day registration tables were inside a gym on the top floor of a dilapidated school building, so I went up there and sat on some mats in one corner.

The scene was intense. It reminded me of All-State choir auditions. People all around me were twisting, kicking, bending, stretching their calves against the wall, pinning and re-pinning their race numbers, and making final adjustments to their iPods. Twitchy, twitchy people, and we were still nowhere near our start time. I just watched it all play out while I nibbled on my bagel and sipped my water. Half an hour before race time, I figured I'd better quit eating and hey, why not kill some more time in the potty line? Even after that, I still had twenty minutes left to go. I finally went down to the general start line area where people were milling about only to see the sun desperately trying to break through the heavy clouds. It was still drizzling, but it seemed less bone-chillingly cold than before. Yay!

A bagpipe player began playing to tell us to line up. The start line was on a downhill, and the line of people waiting to run stretched up the hill and around a sharp corner even further uphill. This race was orders of magnitude bigger than my last one. I lined up most of the way back to the corner. I was maybe halfway back, but I guess I was still too far forward. I chatted a bit with a woman who had lined up next to me, and she was going for roughly the same pace I was, so I didn't feel out of place.

And then a whole herd of cowbells rang out to start the race and we were off! Holy moley, it was like the running of the bulls or something. People took off down that hill like a shot. The road was full of potholes and required considerable attention to navigate without losing an ankle in the process. I drifted toward the right and tried to remind myself to start slow. We went into the first turn, people passing me in hordes, and there were even runners leaping around parked cars and dashing down sidewalks trying to get an advantage. Massive puddles covered the next turn (onto Hemlock Avenue, yikes!) and the next, and trying not to end up with squishy feet also took up considerable brain hard drive space. A few minutes later, we had to cross a rust-red metal bridge over the canal, and the metal lattice grid offered rather slippery footing. After another turn, about when I was starting to wonder if I had missed Mile 1, there it was. "11:44!" the kid yelled out as I passed, and the woman next to me expressed violent displeasure. "That's gun time, not chip time," I reminded her, and showed her my watch: 11:24. Hey, every 20 seconds helps.

The chatter died down as we got to the course's first uphill, crossed another longer, higher bridge over the river, and turned left. There were people ahead of me as far as the eye could see. As I was still going over the bridge, I saw a guy proudly carrying a Marine Corps flag past the turn, red banner flapping in the wind. Maybe I got bib number 478 to denote how many people passed me in that first mile!

After the turn, we had a great view of the skyscrapers downtown, the fog shrouding their tops in gray. "Nice view," I commented to the guy next to me, "but it'd be even nicer if the sun were out." However, it was not raining very hard at all at that point, and I was even thinking about taking off my gloves. The course went past some churned-up vacant land (apparently a future casino site, according to one conversation I overheard) and then offered a view of a beautiful stone firehouse that had to be a hundred years old.

And suddenly we saw a tall man in white come streaking down the other side of the road--the leader, and we hadn't even hit mile 2 yet! WOW! We hoi polloi all clapped and cheered for him as he went by, and for the next 5 guys or so behind him. We saw about 15 or 20 more guys before we saw the first woman, and another big cheer went up for her and the next 5 or 10 women behind her.

We crossed Mile 2 just after we saw the first woman: "21:41!" the kid yelled out. Wow, I had clearly picked it up from Mile 1. I took my gloves off and zipped them into a pocket where they stayed for the rest of the race. On we went, the course turning uphill again, and I got passed by three women wearing shamrock deelyboppers on their heads, shamrock scarves, green poufy skirts, and knee-high green-and-white striped socks. Quite the outfit! I liked the socks the best.

We turned right onto a side street, and there was the water station. I pulled my gel pack out and opened it while I was still running, collected a glass of water, and went off to the side to walk while I ate the gel and drank the water. I figured it was more important to get the water in me than shave a few more seconds off my time. The gel was kind of gross--too thick and not very tasty. I did my best to taste as little of it as possible. My watch said 30:03 when I started running again.

Around the next corner was the Animal Protective League (I've always wondered where it was! Now I know.) and the Mile 3 marker. I don't remember the split the kid yelled out as I went by, but it was definitely in the acceptable range. We kept on going up the hill to the stoplight, where we got to turn left and go downhill at last! Now we were the ones on the way back, and the fact that there were still people on the outbound leg (to be fair, a lot of them were walkers, and I even saw one guy using a walker) meant that I would not be last! Whoo-hoo! I even passed some people on this stretch. Not a ton, mind you, but I finally got in on the passing action.

I was running strongly and felt really good, not struggling at all. I still felt pretty conversational, even. So although the gel did not score high on the palatability scale, it provided perfectly good fueling. I passed Mile Marker 4 with a confused kid yelling "41:05! I mean, 42:07!" "I liked 41 better!" one lady yelled back with a laugh. Then she turned to her partner and said, "Let's do a ten-minute mile and finish in 52 minutes! We can do it!" The two of them then started fartleking from telephone pole to telephone pole. Pretty funny stuff!

As my section of the pack turned right to go over another bridge, we all had to move over to let an ambulance through. Hopefully it wasn't for one of us. I passed a few more people going over the bridge, and then one or two more going down the hill into the next turn. "Good job," one woman said very nicely to me as I passed her. What a kind thing to say! I thanked her equally warmly.

I think the moment that will really stay with me from this race, though, is coming around the next turn and down the hill toward the same rust-red bridge over the canal we crossed early on. I realized that I was almost done, that I had maybe a half mile to go and I was rockin' it. I passed a man who had parked his car on the side there just to cheer on the racers. "Good job! Well done! Way to go!" he said to all of us running by, and his kids in the car waved and smiled at us. Just past where he had parked, there was an Irish pub, and on the sidewalk in front of it was an elderly man with gleaming white hair and moustaches, standing there playing the bagpipes in full Scottish dress. The sound echoed and bounced off the bottom of the overpass just ahead and wrapped us in song.

A big, sloppy, stupid grin plastered itself on my face right then and there and stayed put for the rest of the race. I unzipped my jacket as I crossed the bridge to make sure my bib number was visible, ran straight for two more blocks, and made the last turn. The final two blocks were a steep uphill to the finish. There were people on the sidelines cheering, and then I saw the red glow of the clocks on either side of the street.

Oops. I broke my promise. The clocks said something like "51:25", and there was no way I was just going to stop and walk so I could come in over 52:00. No way. So I kept up my effort, feeling a bit winded as the hill got steeper, but then I saw the race photographer, gave him an even bigger grin, and hauled ass over that finish line and stopped my watch.

51:30. No way!! Woot woot woot woot! I felt elated. What a great race! I didn't kill myself, my body parts mostly kept quiet (my right inner thigh said hello shortly after mile 2, and the inside of my right knee made a brief cameo around mile 4, but they both shut up pretty quickly), and the rain had mostly held off! It got colder and heavier just before the finish, but with a finish like that, who cares?

I grabbed some pizza, an apple, and a bottle of water and went back to the upstairs gym to get out of the weather and stretch. And wouldn't you know it--the other half of my Elvis bagel was still there! Bonus!

I am still floating on air. This race went about as well as it possibly could have at this stage of my training. And the official results are already posted (Wow!). My official chip time? 51:25!! That's a 10:17 pace per mile! I placed 90th in my age group out of 154 people and 1635th overall out of 2153 people who actually finished the race. So not only was I not last, I beat about 25% of the field. Yes, folks, I am inching my way toward midpack status! Whoo-hoo!!

My only regret is that I didn't see Kelli's text message. She's my Team in Training mentor, and she and Lindsey offered to meet up with me and go up to the race together. I would have loved to have been not so alone in that giant crush of people, but I didn't see her message until I got back to my car after the race. Sorry, Kelli! But she and Lindsey did well, and my other Team in Training buddy Melissa ran the race too despite battling plantar fasciitis. Her time was great considering her injury! Hope you feel better soon, Melissa!

I can't wait to brag at tomorrow's group run!