As I mentioned previously, my wife and I ran a relay race together on Sunday morning. We both had a great time, and I would guess this has been our favorite race that we have run so far. Something about doing it as a team made it pretty cool for both of us and we're already talking about other relay races that we may do in the near future, including a Marathon relay with a couple of our friends.
The trip was partially a get away day for us both as parents, any time having no kid responsibilities and a day/night away is something that we relish. With the race on Sunday, we pretty much planned Saturday as a casual travel day with no real plans. We eventually headed out on the road around 10:30am and started the roughly 3 hour drive up to Augusta, Maine. On the way, we found a cracker barrel restaurant that I convinced her to stop at for lunch. We probably had not eaten at one of these for 6+ years, but I always used to love eating at them as a kid years and years ago.
Now, there are probably many Dos and Don'ts the day before a race and on this trip I pretty much put together a very long and successful list of things that you should not do before the race. The first being eating a bunch of fried foods at Cracker Barrel. I ended up having some fried catfish, and it tasted great, but the next 4-6 hours my stomach really was having issues with it. I am not sure if this is a by-product of my improved eating lately and just not being as used to fried foods or something else was going on there. My wife was having similar issues but she never does well with fried foods. I remember when we both went down to Georgia to visit family years ago, she got sick for a week from the food.
After lunch, we got back on the road and made it to Augusta, Maine at the hotel and checked in/ settled down for an hour. By settle down, I mean we both ended up falling asleep for about an hour.. woops
We woke up in time though to go down to the city center to pick up our race packet/shirts/timing chip and then decided to walk a little bit of the course just to check it out. We realized a little difference from our planning, that the start and finish lines were about 1/4th of a mile apart from each other, and the first leg would end up running about 1/2 a mile further than the second leg. We decided to keep things as planned though, since the first leg was more down hill and in the end that 1/2 mile shouldn't matter that much.
After walking about an hour and just checking out the center of town and some kind of neat historical significant stuff, we made our way to the movie theater for a date night movie and went to see the new Superman movie. This is where our 2nd poor eating the day before the race kicked in. The movie was at 6:50pm, and we basically kind of just skipped dinner. my wife had popcorn, and I ate peanut m&ms and had an icee to drink. I don't know why I chose that, I have virtually cut M&M and other candy out of my life, and definitely would have been better drinking the water. I don't know if it was something about being on a trip that told my brain to completely go off of the reservation.. but thats what I had.
We both enjoyed the movie, and it finished around 9:50 or so. Too late for dinner, but my wife wanted a bagel at Panera before we went to the hotel for sleep. I decided for dinner, from Panera I would have a blueberry muffin... So yea, eating a blueberry muffin at 10pm the night before a race is likely not a good idea either... We made it back to the hotel, and called it a night.
Morning wakeup was 5:45am, the race started at 7:30am, so an early going for us. My wife grabbed an oatmeal and coffee for breakfast. Since I had been eating like a champ thus far this trip, I continued by completely skipping breakfast. I have all kinds of issues when I eat within 2 hours of running, where I have to really use the bathroom bad, and just can't keep running. I have gotten to the point where it is really difficult for me to run after having eaten at all so I just went with it as that was what I was used to.. So just for the record, the 3 meals I had before a race was: Fried catfish, Peanut M&Ms and a blueberry muffin. Awesome
We head out about 6:45am to get over to the race, and as soon as we got in the car, like the very second, the skies opened up and it was crazy hard rain. The rain continued right up until about 10 minutes before the race would start at that rate. By the time the race was to start, it was just a light drizzle. My wife was definitely going to have to run in the rain though. We had a big debate on whether or not she wanted to bring her iphone and headphones with her or not (fear of it getting ruined in the rain), as well as if she wanted to bring her hydration water bottle which we had packed just in case it ended up being super hot and humid instead of the rain. She finally decided to change her mind with 3 minutes before the start of the race and wanted to bring it with her afterall. I literally ran up a huge grass hill to the car and back to get it all for her before the start.. and then she was off!
We had gone over the game plan before she had left. The goal was for her to just have fun, not stress about it too much and she wanted to try to set a new 10k record for herself. We felt if she could keep even 12:00min/mile paces for most of the race, she would do great. The obvious exception being the big hill in mile 3 that she had to cover, but otherwise just coast through til mile 6 and then she could speed up if she felt she had more to give. That would put her to the relay hand off at around 1:20:00 - 1:25:00 somewhere and put us in pretty good position to beat our goal of a 2:30:00 combined half-marathon we felt without having too much pressure on ourselves.
After she was off, I took a few final pictures and then went to get in my car. I found my route to my relay handoff stop was somewhat parallel to the race path, so I was able to stop for a few more pictures of her before I went on to my place. (A big parking lot of a grocery store where the rail trail ends). Once I got there and parked, I had a good hour or so till she was going to arrive, thus no need for me to warm up yet. Instead I just took time chatting with some of the other relay team members that were also waiting. There were 11 teams, and about 5-6 of us were standing together chatting. I found one other team was from Massachusetts also, and actually lived and worked near me which was kind of neat.
The first half marathon runners arrived a little bit later (about 40 minutes or so in to the race) and I decided to start warming up a little bit. I just ran easy pace around the parking lot for 1/2 a mile to try to wake up my legs and just figure out how my stomach was feeling. I felt pretty good surprisingly for the horrible eating and all of the travel plus sleeping in an unfamiliar hotel bed. I did realize though that the weather was going the wrong direction for me. The rain I was hoping for had ended, and now it was just getting gross and sticky.. not really what I wanted.
The temperature suggested perhaps a 10 seconds per mile slower pace from my original plan perhaps.. nothing major but the dew point was not helping things much either...
| DEW POINT (°F) | RUNNER\'S PERCEPTION | HOW TO HANDLE |
| 50–54 | Very comfortable | PR conditions |
| 55–59 | Comfortable | Hard efforts likely not affected |
| 60–64 | Uncomfortable for some people | Expect race times to be slower than in optimal conditions |
| 65–69 | Uncomfortable for most people | Easy training runs might feel OK but difficult to race well or do hard efforts |
| 70–74 | Very humid and uncomfortable | Expect pace to suffer greatly |
| 75 or greater | Extremely oppressive | Skip it or dramatically alter goal |
I decided after running warm up and feeling pretty good that I would perhaps alter my plan slightly but not too much. I would still aim for 9:10 pace, but not try to push it too much on hill sections and if I slipped to 9:20 or 9:30 in some parts, I was not going to worry about it too much. My big goal was to try to pace myself well enough to have a strong finish rather than just holding on as best I could.
I made it back to the relay hand off station, and cheered for the various half marathon runners as they came through. I saw most of the other relay teams come through, which was no big shock since we did not expect to compete to win this thing. My wife ended up coming through as the 10th team, but she did great with her time and pacing. She came in at 1:21:00 and averaged a 12:15 pace over her 10k Personal record that she set for herself (1:16:25). I gave her a kiss, handed her the camera and car key and headed off for my turn to run (after posing for a picture on my way out). I wasn't in a super hurry on the hand off transition since I knew we wernt competing for anything and just wanted to have fun with it. My exact words to her was that
30 seconds wern't going to make a difference. Remember that for later in this post as that would come back to bite me
So I headed out, and the run was fairly pretty, along the river almost the entire way. My entire run was a gradual ascent, but I would say most of the trail felt pretty flat and easy for me to run. There were a few hills, none any worse than what I normally run on at home so I just kept to my pacing as best as I could to find a pretty comfortable pace that wasn't winding me much.
Not a whole lot to talk about most of the splits, I felt that I ran the first mile a little faster than I wanted, so slowed down a hair in mile 2, and then ran into a couple of small hills that I pretty much just ran through without it affecting me too much. The mile 4 split looks like I sped back up some, but it was mostly due to my one big downhill that I had that I sped down and then ran through the middle of a small Maine town for about 1/2 a mile. I pretty much kept my pace still around 9:10 other than that hill and by the time I got to mile 5, I was feeling really good, not struggling at all.
During the race, since I was running the relay in the middle of a few hundred people running a full half-marathon, I was able to catch up and pass a good 20-30 people as I ran. That was actually a pretty cool feeling for me since it made me feel really dominant even though in reality those people had run 6.7 more miles than I had at the time, so wasn't really fair. At one point though, I was surprised as I heard foot steps coming up quick behind me, it was the last placed relay team's 2nd runner had caught me. He was literally flying and blew by me like I was doing nothing. He was likely running around 6:45-7:00 pace easily. In talking before running, he had told me that he ran tons of marathons and half marathons, and had come here to do this with his wife also who was a beginner runner. I thought that was pretty cool, even though I now was in last place for relay teams
No big deal though, I knew I wasn't going to be able to keep up with him, and even trying to would sabotage my race, so I kept up my pace. and ran my own race I guess you can say.
By the time I had hit mile 5, and was feeling good as I had mentioned above, I had come to the realization that I was likely not catching any of the other relay teams (most of them had too much of a head start on me I figured), so I focused mainly on just trying to finish my 10k strong. I kept to my 9:10ish pace through the 5th mile and knew at mile 6 that I had a 45:33 time. Doing the math in my head, I knew that gave me 11 minutes for the final 1.22 miles to try to beat my PR. I had 1.4 miles or so left in the race, so decided that it was time the final mile to see what I had left in the tank. I pushed up to about a 8:50 pace, or so but then found a few downhill stretches that let me comfortably pick up even more. I reached the 6 mile point at 54:32 and saw the bridge right before the finish line and just gave the rest that I had (which wasn't too much at that point). I ended up running the last 3/10th of a mile at an 8:16 pace, or pretty much treating it like an interval and ran across the finish line.
For the most part, I was pretty happy with how I ran the race. I definitely think it was my best run 10k race so far, not only because of the time but just how I handled the pacing. When I passed 6.22 miles on my watch, it was really close to my previous PR time, but I knew that it would be close. I laughed with my wife a bit on the way home as I asked her if it made me obsessed that I wanted to get home to sync my watch to see if I got a new personal record for the 10k or not
Well, I did set a new 10k PR by about 30 seconds. Not quite reaching my goal of 55 minutes, but I did not expect to make that goal with the weather the way it was. I actually didn't expect to set a PR honestly when I started out, so this was a happy result for me. My 1 mile second best time of 8:24 was actually the last mile that I ran in this race. I guess it is a good sign when the end of the race is your strongest, and perhaps the strongest that you have ever felt as a runner.
As for the race results.. well we did finish last, which was not a big deal to us. We met all of our goals, both of us set new 10k Personal records, and our combined Half-marathon time was under our goal of 2:30:00. We had a great time and were super satisfied...
Looking at the results though, I realized.. the relay team right in front of us finished only 5 seconds before me! I went to go look at the pictures that my wife had taken at the finish line.....
Yep.. the guy right in front of me is team #478.. and I came through without realizing that I only needed a little more to pass him and not finish last... Going back to what I said at the hand off.. 30 seconds wouldn't kill us.. whooops
Ever since we found that out, my wife has been telling me that I was fired, or just saying to me "5 seconds". We both had a really good time though, and look forward to another relay in the future. As for the other relay team that passed me earlier on.. he finished a good 10 minutes before me and had passed a few other relay teams. Pretty incredible on his part!