The day before the race

I have the Orca Half Marathon tomorrow morning in West Seattle. It’s the first race I’ve run in about 4 years (since the Washington Rock n Roll in Bellevue before Hazel was born - that’s a race in which I spectacularly blew up and could barely cross the finish line). I’ve had some pretty steady training for the last 4 or so months, averaging a very consistent 20 miles a week, which is a big deal for me!

For years, I’d run into knee pain anytime I ran over ~40 minutes. I’d hobble up the stairs afterwards, and my knees might occasionally buckle going down stairs. But one night I was at Chris’s house and he asked if I had any goals, and I said I wanted to at least run as much as I did last year, which was just over 500 miles. So I started trying to run 10 miles a week, and I made 3 changes:

  1. I allowed myself to run as slowly as I needed. In the past, if I was running something like 9 minute pace, I would remember how fast I used to run and try to speed up out of pride. But the reality of the situation was that I was often running 9 minute pace because I was a 9 minute runner.

  2. I tried to follow a half marathon training plan, some “Intermediate 1” one in a book I had gotten long ago. I didn’t exactly do all of the runs (I usually did 3-4 a week), but I at least tried to do the long run each week, and that helped a lot.

  3. One day, going around Seward, I realized that I had a pretty bad hip drop on my right side, it was almost like I wasn’t fully standing up. I played around with it and realized that I could somewhat move the pain around my knee by changing just how much I was “standing up” when I ran. I later realized that this is what people say when they say you should engage your glutes when you run.

I’m hoping to simply go out with the 8 mile minute pace group. That should hopefully put me under 1:45. A lot of my long runs have been around 9 minute pace, sometimes slower. In my 13 mile runs in training, the wheels usually come off in the very last mile, and it ends up being pretty painful. My watch currently thinks I can run 1:38:49, though I’m not sure where it got that number.

The race

I should have gotten to the starting line a lot earlier. I lost some time doing some warm ups away from the start line, and then had to rush to the bathroom, so I was only at the start line for ~2 minutes before it felt like the gun went off.

I ended up going out with the 1:45 pacer. After about the first two miles, I started talking to the pacer to try to keep myself relaxed and calm. It didn’t feel too strained or anything. I wasn’t looking at my watch or anything, we were just talking. A couple of miles in, he said we were at 1:44 pace, which seemed great to me. Maybe in retrospect, he was trying to slow me down.

at 6 miles, still hanging with the pacer

At some point, though, we started running a lot harder. By mile 5, we had accidentally cut down to a 7:22 mile. We stuck around 7:30s until mile 8, when I started really straining. At 8.5, I fell off the pacer, and I was mentally just trying to get to 10. I thought my left calf was about to cramp up, and my adductors were pretty tight, which was causing my right knee to act up. And on top of that, I had run in an older, but more reliable pair of shoes, and I had some bad blisters forming on the inside of my right foot.

After fighting to 10, I stopped to stretch and realized that I still had to do another 3. I fought not to quit, knowing that my daughters would be asking me how the race went, while being passed by pretty much everyone else in the first wave. My cardio felt all right, but my body was just spent, and there wasn’t much more I could have done at that point, I had raced foolishly. It didn’t help my mental that I thought that I had spent the first 8 miles running 8:00 pace - I didn’t realize it was closer to 7:45 pace and that we had cut down so drastically. I tried talking to myself, holding my posture, engaging my glutes, and swinging my arms more, but it didn’t feel like anything really helped. I was just spent. In retrospect, I should have done more deliberate pacework in training.

at the finish, please pay no attention to that heel strike!

I finished at 1:53 and was pretty bummed. Weather was pretty much perfect and the route was as flat as you could ask for in Seattle.

the race recap on Strava

After the race

I was pretty disappointed for a few days. I took some solace in realizing that I had actually taken the first 8 miles a lot faster than I thought.

I actually went out and got a coach. I just finished my first week working with him (he writes my training plans each week), and I’ve signed up for the Seattle Half Marathon, exactly 8 weeks away. I’m feeling pretty optimistic about all of it, and am now just hoping that I can execute my training plan well, stay healthy, and fuel better. I’m having much more fun running right now… I can feel myself starting to dream again about what might be possible.