Week 21 Wrapup

I am very ashamed to report that I lost my footrace. Steven proved that although he's never run more than a mile before, youth and a thin physique are more than enough to beat an old fat man who's been running for 5 months.

I had a bunch of things going against me:

• I had only had about two hours of sleep the night before, and about three hours the night before that.


• I'm not used to running in the morning anway.


• My left tibia, which has been hurting for a while, hurt a lot that day.


• The course was hillier than I expected. The hills themselves weren't slowing me down much, but were exhausting me so that I was running slower overall.


• I had been trying to time my fluid intake well, but the race started 15 minutes late. That's 15 minutes I was planning to be sweating out water instead of sending it to my bladder, and 15 minutes sooner I would have been to the bathroom. Instead, I lost a minute due to having to duck out behind the bushes at the 5 mile mark.


• Again, because the race started 15 minutes late, I was just standing still for 15 minutes under the (really) hot sun. That's pretty draining in itself.

The "official" results for the 2008 Tanque Verde Tech Trek are here: http://tvseef.org/Tech%20Trek%202008%20Reg(6).pdf. Steven had just over an hour, I had 1:03:18 by my watch, and 1:03:17 by their time.

The word "official" hardly applies, because they had no timekeeper, just a handful of watches and cell phones. We lined up at the start line at 8:00, but it wasn't until about 12 minutes later that someone finally let the runners know that their timekeeper hadn't shown up. The race finally started at 8:15.

The whole thing seemed really disorganized. When I went to pick up our bibs, we got them all handed to us together, but they had no names on them to indicate whose was whose. So, I had to ask them to look up which was which so I could put our names on. I heard one race person mention to another, "See, that's where those labels would have been handy". Duh.

So then, right before the race finally starts, someone announces that everyone needs to make sure their names are on their bibs. Everyone collectively looks at that person like, "Huh?", because this is the first they've heard of this, and nobody mentioned that when they picked up their bib, and they've already been waiting almost 15 minutes for the race to start, and nobody had a pen in their shorts. Nor were they happy to see the person who had just announced that.

Also, the "breakfast" afterwards was gross. They had oatmeal, toast, trail mix, and oranges in the school cafeteria. I generally like oatmeal, but never at a school cafeteria. If they had a pancake breakfast or something, that would have been worth sticking around for, but as it was, I would rather have had the normal post-race food like at other races.

It's possible that it was actually well-planned. They did go through the trouble of getting their course USATF certified this year (although that's pointless without a timekeeper). Still, the whole thing is a lesson that no matter how well you've planned an event, let a few key details go amiss and the whole thing is ruined.

As for me, I can try again at the next local 10k on May 4th, but whether or not I do that is going to depend on what happens with my leg. I'm going to take the entire next week off to rest it, then see if it's still hurting after that, and plan my training accordingly.