A chilly day in hell

My plan for New Year’s day was to ride the Santa Cruz Randonneurs’ Grey Whale 200K. Some events just seem to be doomed from the beginning. First, the website listed the town that the ride began in, but got no more specific than that. When I tried to find a “Contact Us” link to find out more, I found only a snail mail address. No email, no phone number. I found a facebook group, but I’m Facebook retarded, so I couldn’t figure out how to ask there. Finally I found a Google group and managed to send out a WTF in e-smoke signals.

But the complications didn’t end there. The course was an out-and-back along the coast from Aptos to Moss Landing. Going north on the Pacific Coast Highway is the windiest place on the planet, and I felt no small amount of trepidation about riding 62 miles into a severe headwind, especially with sub-par cycling fitness. Oh yeah, and it was going to rain. All day. But then again, as far as I could tell, Aptos and Moss Landing are only about 20 miles apart, so I couldn’t figure out how the hell they were going to get 125 miles out of that anyway.

To be at the 7:30 start an hour and a half away, I was going to have to get up at 4:30. Like a good little girl, I was in bed by 9:30, but my neighbors weren’t behaving nearly as nicely. They were drunk and rowdy, and most of all, LOUD! I pictured them walking around with lampshades on their heads as they kept me up until midnight, then came outside to set off fire crackers and be loud in the yard until 2 in the morning. When my alarm went off 2 ½ hours later, the Weather Channel said it was raining in Aptos and I rolled over and went back to sleep.

I was furious at the world all day. If there were only 52 weekends in a year to ride the world, then I had just gotten the first and most important 1/52 of 2011 stolen from me by a bunch of drunken old people. I decided that I would pay $60 to run a half marathon the next day, and I would run it like a punishment. So far, my new year’s resolutions weren’t going so well. They were:

-Stop letting small hiccups get in the way of my getting back in shape, and be organized to miss fewer workouts

-Save more money

-Not race for anything but enjoyment for six months, and race EVERYTHING that looked like fun

I slept at Scout’s house the night before, and we were in bed by 10:30 like good little girls. All I needed was to get up by 6, but when she got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night I looked at my watch: 6:50. HOLY FUCK! I sprang out of bed, got dressed as fast as I could, ran to Starbucks (priorities, people! Starbucks, please sponsor my blog), and was on the road by 7:10.

Everything seemed to be going smoothly for me to arrive in plenty of time for the 8:30 start when the freeway came to a dead halt. One exit before mine, they had closed the freeway. So five lanes of traffic suddenly had to exit onto a back street. It took me 25 minutes to get to the exit 100 yards away. Now I was certain 2011 was doomed, and I was wondering if it was worth going home and getting really fat before I jumped off the bridge, or whether I should just pull over on the Bay Bridge on the way home and get it over with.

I got to the venue with 10 minutes until start time and sprinted through the throngs of 5 and 10K runners. Their races didn’t start for another half hour. Lucky fucks! I found the registration tent and asked the girls at the front of the line if I could cut them like I owned the place. “You know they pushed the start back 10 minutes, right?” they asked.

“So I have 14 minutes rather than just four?” I said, trying unsuccessfully to be polite. I sounded rude. I did my best to make up for it by thanking them every 10 breaths for as long as I was at the registration table.

“We’ll send you your finisher’s medal tomorrow,” the registration lady said.

“Oh god, I so don’t care!” I said.

“Don’t lie!” said one of the ladies I’d cut. “You have a trophy case at home.” For the record, no, I don’t. All my finisher’s medals and trophies stayed home in Boston.

After sneaking off into the weeds to have a quick (and very, very necessary) pee, I got to the start line just in time to tie my shoes before the countdown. The pee-splattered, nicely-tied shoes were my racing flats. The website had said that half of the course was paved and the hills were similar to the training-bra-flat course that I’d run on Thanksgiving. Since I planned on running like I stole something, my racing flats seemed like a better choice than my bulky trail shoes.

Big mistake.

The first mile or so were paved bike trails over rolling hills much like the Thanksgiving course. I was running fast-ish, but nothing like I used to race at. Also, it seemed that since I moved to San Francisco, I’d gotten old. My joints felt rickety, my muscles non-compliant, and my lungs grouchy. Then we turned off into the mud for the 2.5 mile, 900 foot climb that would make up the major feature on the course’s elevation profile, and there was mud.

All the people wearing Vibram 5 Fingers started slipping all over the place, as did I. At one point, every time I stepped up, my foot would slip back to its starting point before the next foot could land. My Garmin autopaused and didn’t resume until I crested the next ridge. I walked, scrambled, and slipped up the majority of the next couple of miles.

When I got to the top of the steepest part of the hill, there was a woman standing at the top screaming. Because of the acoustics of the hill, I had been listening to her shrill screaming for minutes and was looking forward to punching her in the face --or at the very least giving her a dirty look--at the top. Of course, when I reached her, I just stared at the ground in front of me so that I wouldn’t get a mouthful of mud.

“WHOOOOOOOOO!” she screamed. “THERE ARE ONLY A FEW IN FRONT OF YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

A couple of what? Rodents of Unusual Size? Eventually I figured out that she probably meant ‘women.’ ‘A few’ is a relative term.

At the top of the hill, there was still more hill to climb, but where the last inclines had been far from what the race organizers had called, “runable,” these were the kinds of hills that don’t interrupt your stride and just make your life miserable. Life was miserable for me right now, if you couldn’t tell. My body wasn’t feeling all that snappy, and mud was seeping in the vents in the soles of my shoes. I was also finding loud noises really disorienting, which was really getting to be a problem because I’d been running next to a shooting range for a mile or more.

I kept hearing the CRACK of rifles and then a rumble. I don’t like guns. Guns make me nervous and they make too much noise. They make it too easy to kill someone. The snapping in my ears was making me feel like maybe I was going to be next. If I’d known I was going to be running in a war zone, I would have stayed home --or at least worn a brighter colored shirt.

All the gunshots had been over my right shoulder, but suddenly there was a loud gunshot off my left shoulder. “JESUS!” I said, out loud.

Jesus delivered me a friend. “That’ll get you to run uphill faster!” the guy I was about to pass called over his shoulder. “What time are you shooting for?”

“I was going for sub-2, but now I just want to finish with enough time to get all my errands done for the day.” From there a conversation started, which is how I found out that this guy was Me in Boy Form. We were both personal trainers who worked within a few blocks of each other. We both had the same susceptibility to surprise over-distance rides. He was big for a runner, just like me. His name was Chris, which is what a lot of people think I say my name is when they’re not really listening.

Me as a Boy and I spent the next six or seven miles talking shop and swapping stories of rewarding training experiences, and outdoing each other with 'stupidest thing I've ever done at a race' stories. I didn’t even notice that we were running anymore, or passing people. If we were passed, I didn’t notice that either.

“Holy cow!” I said. “We’ve only got a couple more miles of this nonsense!” We were back on pavement now, running down a steep downhill that we were going to have to turn around and run right back up once we got to the bottom. Me in Boy Form decided that he was going to walk part of the hill, but since I only had about a mile and a half to go, I thanked him and plugged on alone up the hill at what could barely pass as a “run.”

I had seen another chick in the out-and-back segment that I decided that I would try to reel in. Once I hit more shallow hills and my body’s signals could be trusted again, I noticed again that I was tired and old. I saw the girl that I was reeling in at the top of a hill when I was at the bottom of said hill, but couldn’t bring her back in the .2 miles I had to the finish.

I reached the finishing area all by myself, and could see the finishing arch about 10 yards in front of me. The crowd was pointing to a line of flags to my left, away from the finishing arch. “What the hell is this?” I yelled. “The finish line’s right there!” I could feel people chuckling as I rounded the small grassy field to the finishing arch. I slipped and slid on the muddy grass as I tried to sprint across the line. I had to put on a show now that everyone was watching me: the chick who bitches. I finished in about 2:08 (2:06:59 according to Garmin).

“It must have been a fast course today,” a photographer told me at the finish line. “Last year the winner finished in 1:50 and everyone was surprised because they thought that was fast.” What the hell kind of race can you moonwalk 2 miles of and still have a “good” time?? It was enough to convince me to stick around until the results were posted. “Look,” the photographer said, gesturing to a woman with a fuel belt. “You never see middle-aged women finishing in under 2:30.” Where the hell was I? You see middle-aged women finish in under 1:30 all the time. If you were fast enough to be at the finish line yourself before they finish.

It must have been a pretty frigid day in hell, because I’d made third in my age group. And there were more than three people in my age group too. Twelve to be exact. Or someone with the same first name as me and all the same consonants as my last name and the wrong vowels got third in my age group, anyway. (They also had me down for living in the wrong town). I got 46th out of 221 overall, and 8th female.

As much as I would like to think that I’m “all that and a bag of chips” as Michelle says, I know better. I don’t think I was in any better than low-1:50’s half marathon shape, which in Boston would barely get me into the top 40%. The middle aged ladies routinely beat me, and snatch up all the extra small t-shirts before I get there. Boston is a running city. I picked up my bronze medal and didn’t know what to make of it. Should I put it in my imaginary trophy case? I kind of felt like I’d cherry picked the medal; like I’d shown up with a motorbike at a cycling race.

Over the next 24 hours I had to accept that Old was contagious, and I’d caught a bad case of it from Scout. My knees were cranky coming down the stairs, my quads were sore (imagine that! I never get sore! Not me!), I was deathly tired, and a cramp in my traps kept me awake deep into the night. I guess when you get to be 27 1/2, you can’t get away with what you used to be able to get away with when you were 27, and you need to be more on top of your stretching and recovery.

But I don’t LIKE yoga!