Old Hallowell Days 5K

By my count, there were 5 different 5K races on July 20th within a 25 mile radius. There were none on the 21st and there were none the weekend before. Of those 5, only 2 had a course map online and only 1 gave any sort of evidence that they'd post their results online in any sort of timely manner (sure enough, a couple of days later, it's the only one who has).

This annoys me to no end.

So obviously, I headed to Hallowell for the Old Hallowell Days 5K, which promised chip timing. Really, the chip timing won me over, even though the course promised to be (probably) the most difficult one. I know this because they took the time to put the course on MapMyRun. Gee, imagine that.

Create Maps or search from 80 million at MapMyRun

This isn't hard. Seriously, it isn't hard.

Anyway, on to the race itself. 7:30 start. A $5 deposit for the chip timing from Lynx (a chip that attaches to your shoelaces). And a course with quite a few hills, even a "graded" one. Neither of the half marathons I've run has had a "graded" hill. Of course, my 10-mile training loop has 3 of them, but my training has been going terribly, partly because I've got some sort of quitter's mental block and partly because of the heat indexes.

Have I mentioned that Maine's been in a heat wave? Really the entire northeast has, but temperatures in Maine have been brutal lately--high 90's with humidity. So training has been terrible and really everything has been terrible.

Basically, I've been trying to acclimate to the heat, but that's going badly. And the long runs have been going badly since the Lewiston debacle. Really, everything feels like it's going badly, beyond the 5Ks, which have been pretty good, for the most part. The longer stuff? Awful. But how much of that is the heat? And how much is me being a clusterfuck of awful? When you're at mile 5, it's hard to tell the difference.

I think part of it is mental. You quit because your brain talks you into quitting, and that's a tough thing to overcome. It killed Chuck Knoblauch's career. It's killed a fuckload of golfer's careers. Is it as serious as "the yips"? No, but it's the start.

It's that voice inside your head, that little devil on your shoulder trying to convince you this is a bad idea. You could go sit in the shade over there. You could go see a movie instead. You could quit. Honestly, you could. You don't have to do this anymore.

Lately that voice has been winning.

All that to say it's hot out and I'm not anticipating a good time. But one look around the starting area and you can tell that some people are. There's 215 people in this race and the demographics skew young. Super young. Clearly this is a race all the local competitive types have targeted.

The start is flat, and thus fast. We go down Water Street past The Liberal Cup (a very cool bar in Hallowell). But with the turn off Water Street comes the first hill and my pace for mile 1 drops pretty quickly from 7:05 at the first half to 7:27. By the way, you can check it out yourself on Strava.

You can see on the mile splits where it starts to fall apart. That big hill is looming and to make it worse, I feel like I'm overheating and that devil on my shoulder is going into overdrive. And then, suddenly, I just stop and start walking, almost as if my brain took a break for a few minutes. I walk for a few steps, then start again.

"It's ok," the devil on my shoulder says, "you're just resetting your pace (whatever the hell that means). You're just stopping to hydrate."

And then the hill comes. Here's where my bad run of training comes in. I can't make it up the hill, nevermind that I've run up bigger hills more times than I can count. This one, I just can't do it. A few more steps of walking, cursing myself the whole time.

Middle Street is better, as it should be. But since I only put up a 7:51 pace on a downhill, I clearly don't have much left in the tank.

The finish line comes into focus, and with it the big clock showing my time. 25 minutes have already passed. I finish in 25:21, far and away my worst 5K time.

That's a pace of 8:09/mi. I'll get more into this later, but Strava has a thing called "GAP", or "Grade Adjusted Pace". It's pretty much what you think it is, an approximation of how fast you would have run on flat ground. That says I ran the equivalent of a 7:51/mi pace, or a 24:23, which isn't much better.

Long story short, I'm not doing well with this whole humidity thing.

How to Fail at Heat Acclimation

I spent most of the winter in New England, gutting out 2 to 3 miles in-between (and during) blizzards, trying to find days the windchill was above zero and wishing for those glorious summer days.

Well…now they're here and they suck.

All summer the weather has pretty much run in a cycle of 2-3 days of heat and humidity surrounded by lots of cold rain. 60 degrees all week, and then suddenly it's 90 with 90% humidity for a day. Then the rain comes back. So do you do your long run in the rain or the humidity? If you have my schedule over the last couple of months, you try and find a long enough stretch when you're free and it's still light out and hope for the best.

I've been trying to acclimate myself to the heat, but it's hard when it won't stay hot. Tuesday I wore a long-sleeve shirt. Two days prior to that, I had to wring the sweat out of my singlet mid-run.

Let's back up a little.

On June 23rd I did my second half-marathon, the Bands on the Run race in Lewiston, Maine. It was humid and I imploded. Total clusterfuck. I threw up my GU packets and got dehydrated and you can guess the rest. It was bad enough that I almost have to do the race again next year, for no other reason than revenge.

So I've been trying to do better with running in the heat and humidity, but it's a tricky thing to acclimate to a temperature when the temperature fluctuates so much.

Flash ahead to Sunday. Long run on a 13-mile loop near my parent's summer camp. 3 miles of it is on a pretty busy road, but the rest is a desolate, including a dirt road where you might see 2 vehicles over the entirety of the 5 miles. And there's a lake at the camp, so you can cool off at the end. Perfect, right?

It's hot out. Very hot. Pushing 90.

The 3 miles on the busy road goes pretty well, other than the sense that I'm running through an oven. There's no shade and the only breeze comes from traffic. I'm drenched, but still things are going ok-ish.

I make the turn and the horseflies find me pretty much instantly.

I had a problem with them on my last long run, but they went away when it started raining. If you've never had the pleasure of dealing with these things, basically they dive-bomb your face until you either kill them or they find something better to attack. And when they bite, it hurts. They're all kinds of evil. A half-mile into the dirt road and I've got 5 or 6 of them circling me. You can't really out-run them and there's no breeze so they just won't stop. After a while, you aren't running anymore, you're just churning your legs while you flail your arms and slap yourself in the head.

To make matters worse, I'm starting to overheat. The GU goes down ok (I think my problem in Lewiston was not drinking enough water with it, so I've started doing the GU in 2 parts), but I can feel my body temp getting too high. I've read that part of acclimation involves stopping, so I plan to stop for a bit at mile 5, which should be well ahead of when I'd need to stop and won't feel like as much of a failure, if that makes sense.

The stop cools me down and gives me a chance to kill more flies, but it also seems to attract more. So I cut the break short.

It doesn't really help.

Around mile 6 it stops being fun, even in a masochist way. I'm drenched in sweat and look like Pigpen, only instead of dirt there's horseflies circling me. If there was a store or something, I'd jump inside to try and lose them, but there's nothing. I stop for a minute around the 7.5 mile mark to try and kill some more. It doesn't work.

I make the turn at mile 8 onto pavement, which is slightly better, but only because there's more traffic and those bursts of wind from cars passing sort of kind of helps a little. By mile 9 I'm miserable. This is fucking bullshit.

Oh, and my anti-chafing shirt is so wet that it's chafing my nipple. Wring the shirt out and sure enough, bloody nipples. I'm almost out of water by this point. I'm so over the whole thing.

At 10.2 miles, I stop. Fuck this shit.

The shirt goes over my head, which is the first thing that's actually helped keep the flies away. I walk the rest of the way back. It takes forever.

Sigh.

Brandon Feyler Memorial 5K (Waldoboro, ME)

Part of my motivation for this was borne of frustration in trying to find information on races.

See, I'm kind of obsessive when it comes to research. I want to know as much as possible in advance. When I trained for my first half marathon, I researched the route and built my training around that, making sure I ran training routes with bigger and longer hills than the one in the race. It helped that there are a lot of hills around here. I want to know what the course is going to look like, if there will be a big hill at the end, stuff like that.

It shouldn't be that hard to find such information. This isn't the internet, circa 1995. There's Google Maps and about a billion different blog platforms and websites one could use to post information about their event, and it'd even be free! Even a badly drawn map would be better than nothing. If someone is interested, they can re-create it on something like MapMyRun.

You know, like this:


That's the start and finish (give or take 100 feet in either direction) of the Brandon Feyler Memorial 5K at Medomak Valley High School in Waldoboro, Maine. That's Medomak Valley's primary entrance and exit. You can see the tennis courts and just north of the loop is the high school itself.

Anyway, the green box is the start line and the red box is the finish. Between the two the course turns left on Manktown Road for an up and back course that's more or less flat.


Sure, there's a small hill in the middle, but that's about the flattest 5K you could hope for in Waldoboro.

As for the race itself, it's a scholarship fundraiser in honor of Brandon Feyler, a local kid who died in a boating accident a couple of years ago. This is the second year. You can find the first year's results here.

The entry fee was $18, which includes a pretty basic cotton t-shirt in Medomak Valley colors (go Panthers!), but it's a scholarship fundraiser.

This was actually only my third 5K since I started running a year ago. I put up a 24:30 at the Pittsburgh Marathon 5K and a 25:03 at the slightly-longer-than-5K Waldoboro Day 5K (no, seriously, that's what the organizer said on the day). My goal, as normal, was to crack that 24:30, which I feel pretty good about, as that was posted the day before my first half-marathon, where I definitely wasn't going 100%. Of course, it's one thing to tell yourself you can PR. It's another thing to actually do it.

The weather is awful, as it has been for what seems like forever. This is one of those stretches where the rain and drizzle stops just long enough to mow the lawn, and that's if you're lucky. So…the weather is shitty. 60 degrees and sort of, kind of raining. Just miserable. But you know you won't have to worry about being too hot, so that's something.

At the start, I go out faster than I probably should, but I feel good and for some reason I'm in second place behind last year's winner. But he's way ahead of me almost immediately. At the first mile (6:40!!!), I'm still in second, but the leader is way ahead of me. Around then, I get passed by 2 people who haven't made my mistake of going out too fast. It's a pretty straight shot and before long, we're at the turnaround. Just before it, I get passed by a young couple running together. I start to fade in the second mile, probably from going out to fast and partially (I think) because I haven't done enough speedwork beyond 1 mile increments, so my legs and lungs are looking for the recovery phase.

I need to get better at my 5K.

The second mile is much too far of a drop. I do that in 7:39. But I'm still comfortably ahead of my PR pace.

The third mile just sucks. I hit the wall. My head wants to quit. My lungs want to quit. Where is the fucking high school already? This is fast enough, right?

After what seems like forever, I start to recognize the buildings around the school, and then there's the turn. I hit the 3 mile mark in 22:14 (mile 3 in 7:55) and suddenly I think maybe I can finish strong. Only, there isn't much left in the tank. I finish, but not nearly as strong as I'd like, in 23:08, finishing in 6th place. A pretty awesome improvement, to be sure, but I'm a little disappointed to get that close to breaking 23 minutes and just missing it.

Afterward there's water and a raffle and prizes to the top finishers. And, you know, more rain.

An Introduction

Hello.

I'm a writer. I've been one in various forms for a long time. But before that, I was something of an athlete. I played basketball and ran cross-country.

I don't know any of my old times. It was a long time ago and we didn't have iPhone apps or training logs or fancy watches or anything like that. We didn't know what a negative split was. We didn't track mile splits.

We showed up, walked to the starting line, and ran.

And then we got pizza. That was the best part.

I gave it up in high school, then picked it up again 15 years later for all the obvious reasons, but mostly because I felt fat. That was a little over a year ago. I've fought injuries along the way, but I've lost 35 pounds. I ran 2 half marathons. One went well. The other one, not so much.

I figured after 500 miles it was time to start writing a little because, well, that's what I do.

So here we are. I'm not sure what this'll become, but I guess we'll find out.

Welcome.