23 July 2013

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.


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