Week 50 Wrapup

I got sick on Monday, and didn't really feel any better until Thursday, so this was another low mileage week. I ran intervals on Thursday, then rested on Friday preparatory to the Bisbee 1000.

Bisbee is an old mining town in southeastern Arizona. It's up at 5400 feet in a little valley with a lot of hills, and people built the town up into the hills, with staircases connecting the various little roads that wind up into the hills. The Bisbee 1000 is a race that runs up 9 of these staircases (for a total of over 1000 steps), then winds through the roads in between them.

I went out on Saturday morning with my sister Elizabeth and her friend Chuck. I was running seriously, but Chuck stayed behind to walk it with Elizabeth. My strategy was to run as fast as I could on the road parts, then take the stairs as slow as I needed to recover. The stairs become bottlenecks and you can't go too fast on them anyway, so I figured I could recover a little on the slow climb.

This year, they tried to do a wave start to eliminate the bottlenecks, since otherwise you've got 1200 people all hitting the first set of stairs at the same time. They announced several times about the waves, but didn't have any clear organization at the starting line, like separate corrals or anything. Based on the times that they announced, I figured I'd start in wave 2, so after the first wave left, I crowded into the starting area as close as I could get, although I was still 8 or 9 rows of people back.

When the second wave started, the first few rows left, and everyone else just stood there. I realized that these chumps weren't planning on going anywhere in this wave, so I elbowed my way to the front just in time for them to pull a rope up across the people and yell at me, "you have to stay behind the line". I tried to explain to the guy doing the yelling that, no, this was the wave I wanted to start in, and these jackholes just standing around prevented me from doing that, but he wasn't listening. Just then, two other guys just went under the rope and took off, so of course I did that too. The yelling guy wheeled around and shouted "Where are you guys going?", which I thought was just a supremely dumb question. I mean, we've got shorts and running shoes on, we've got bibs pinned to our shirts, we're running in the direction of all the other runners...

I didn't get DQed, so my final time was 49:59, which was good enough to place 258 out of 1109 overall. It also got me 18th out of 43 in my age division. The total distance of the course is hard to measure via GPS because of difficulty taking in the vertical ascent in the stairs, but it seems to be around 4.5 miles, and the road stretches between stairs are all anywhere from 1/4 mile to a mile. I ran all the road stretches in under 9 minute/mile pace, and most of them were under 8 minute/mile. My slowest stretch was at an 8:52 pace and that was for a stretch that was mostly uphill.

I'd definitely run the race again, but I'd like them to fix the wave start, either with separate start corrals, or, since everyone's official time is the chip time anyway, just doing it waterslide style (where everyone lines up single file, and one bored looking high school guy just keeps saying "Okay, you can go. Now you can go. Okay, now you can go." over and over.) I would also request some better post race food. They had fruit and water, and people were giving samples of a gross energy drink and espresso, but there were no bagels or anything like that.

Chuck runs with the Hash House Harriers, and after the race, he took us over to where a bunch of hashers were gathering for a feast of boiled shrimp, sausage, corn, onions, potatoes, et cetera. The food alone was worth the trip, and it more than made up for the lack of bagels at the finish.

My next race is probably the stake 5k on November 15th, then something somewhere on Thanksgiving, and at least one in December. Then, I could still possibly do the marathon in Boulder City on January 3rd, or the Phoenix Rock & Roll on January 18th. I also talked extensively with my cousins David, Jimmy, and Tom to work up the idea of us all doing a marathon next summer somewhere. They seemed receptive, but we'll see.

These next few weeks, I'm still going to focus on short distance speed to improve my 5k time. I'm hoping to get to 24:00 (or at least sub-25) at the stake 5k, then to 23:15 by the end of the year, then to my goal of 22:30 by the end of February. To that end, I'm currently working with the following paces:

Race goal pace 7:45
800 - 3:52
400 - 1:56
200 - :58

Speed pace 7:15
800 - 3:37
400 - 1:48
200 - :54

Tempo run pace 8:30

Long run pace 10:00

Once I hit 24:00, I'll bump everything down by 0:15/mile. Once I hit 23:15, I'll bump everything down another 0:15.