10K Pride Run Race Report

Now that my 30x30K challenge is over, I'm shifting my focus to marathon speed. The problem is, I have no idea what kind of pace to target. In the past, my marathon pace/training strategy has looked something like this:

Step 1: Look at pace charts. Pick a time for a race that looks attractive. The average pace of my imagined race is a little bit faster than the fastest mile of any REAL race I have ever actually run.
Step 2: Run workouts for my imagined ideal pace. Have The Phantom Poo frustrate every interval workout I do. Get discouraged. Try to run all of my regular workouts at my imagined race pace, and skip the interval workouts (since I can't hit the intervals anyway). In most of these workouts I have to slow down before the end of the workout, because I don't seem to be able to sustain my imagined race pace for more than a couple of miles. Usually this is because after a few miles I feel like I'm going to poop my pants.
Step 3: Give up and hit the trails where I can't worry about pace anymore.
Step 4: Turn up to the marathon underprepared and run the same time I always run, which is of course much slower than the time I was targeting.
Step 5: Vow to quit running because I suck at it. Try something else.

This time I want to be smarter, and train within myself. But with my new-found fitness, I have no idea what I can REALLY do. Time for a tune-up race. A quick Google search turned up a 10K in San Francisco associated with Pride weekend. I'm not really a rainbow flag kind of gal, but it seemed like a better choice than the 5K alternative closer to the house that warned, "ABSOLUTELY NO COMPETITION, THIS RACE IS FOR FUN!" Party poopers. Plus, I figured, being in the fog belt of the city, it was sure to be the only place in the Bay Area that wouldn't be broiling hot on race day.

There are probably 15 days a year when the sun shines on Golden Gate Park, and only one day every seven years when the sun shines on Golden Gate Park in the morning. When I first moved to San Francisco around this time of year, I stayed a block from Golden Gate park, half a mile from the ocean. Temperatures were in the mid-50's every day that summer. Today, it was already 70 degrees at 8:30 in the morning and this was the one morning in every seven years that it was sunny in the fog belt at 8:00 in the morning. So much for cool weather. Oh well, at least I was adjusted to it now, but I was a little worried about running for 45 minutes without my trusty water bottle that comes with me on every run. My water bottle is my only defense against my superhuman sweat rate, but fast runners don't run 10K's with water bottles, and I wanted to believe that I could be a fast runner too.

As I walked up to the registration table, I was acutely aware of just how gay this event was. Men had limp wrists and gay voices (you know, that whiny drawl that draws out the last word of every sentence and trails off with a note of distain), and women had short hair and gay postures (you know, carrying themselves with a swagger that's half way between James Dean and a self-aware teenaged boy). I don't know if it was stranger for me that I used to be accustomed to being surrounded by so many gay people, or that it felt so weird coming back to it now. You see, I'm not gay. Well I mean, I am, but you wouldn't catch me dead with a rainbow sticker on my car or turning up to some gay pride rally, or palling around with other gay people talking about how gay we are. But then again, here I was on the fringes of the biggest gay pride celebration in the world and by the end of the day I would have a rainbow ribbon around my neck, so never mind. I did hear some guys talking about how they had gone down to city hall that morning and gotten married, though. That was pretty cool. They were probably among the first to do so since Prop 8 was finally shot in the head, and that made my heart soar. I was grateful to the Gay Movement for that, but other than that I was more of the opinion that they should put the rainbow flags away already. This isn't 1989 anymore, right?

Anyway, back to running. I checked in, dropped off my bag, and ran a half mile warm-up. My race plan was to run without a watch, even though I would be wearing my watch on my wrist the whole time. I just promised myself not to look at it, that's all. As I started my warm-up lap, I looked down at my pace: 9:26. I panicked. What if I just didn't have it today? What if my legs were shot? Don't look at the watch, you idiot! Then, about 400m later I looked at the watch again. My pace was 7:20. I was going to win this race! I should run even faster for my warm-up and see what running 6-minute miles felt like. If it felt good, then maybe THAT should be my race pace. Don't look at the watch, you idiot! I put my wrist down and shook out my shoulders. Coming back full circle, I looked at my watch again, 8:45. Oh no, I had spent all my speed in my half-mile warm-up. I was hitting the wall. The race was over. I was probably overheated. My stomach felt sour from the coffee. I would probably throw up. My race was beyond saving!

You can see why I shouldn't race with a watch.

I went to use the bathroom, and there in front of me was... my Sponsor. Now THERE was a blast from my past. Our relationship had ended with her yelling something like, "Fine, quit AA. Go drink! I don't care. Because if you quit The Program, you're going to go back to drinking." Half of me wanted to tell her that in a few weeks I would be 3 years sober and that walking away from AA was the best thing I'd ever done. The other half of me just wanted to run way faster than her. I came out of the bathroom and awkwardly stood next to her for a few minutes as she talked to her friends about the race. It dawned on me that neither of us really wanted to talk to each other, because neither of us really liked each other. That's okay, I don't need everyone to like me, especially the people who I don't care to keep in my life. I wished her luck and walked away, and in my head I wasn't giving her a self-vindicating monologue. It felt pretty good.

I went up to the starting line where people were gathering. A man with a bull horn was talking to us, yammering on about how all the volunteers had synchronized their watches so we should line up in the correct corals because they were going to start ON TIME... What corals? I wondered. We all stood there dumbly. "So get to the start," he said. We stayed put, under the rainbow balloon arch. "Uh, back there," he said. OH! the start was behind us. We moseyed on back and lined up. He followed us. "5K on the left, 10K on the right." Uh, okay. We lined up. I and everyone else wondered, Our right, or his right?

"OH! The 10K start is back there," someone said. So we kept moseying. On the ground were chalked lines with different paces, "6 min/mi," "7 min/mi" and so on. I didn't know where to line up, so I stood in the back of the 7-minute coral, but in front of the 8-minute line. I watched people pick corals. Almost everybody hesitated for a second trying to decide whether it was better to stand in a fast corral and look like a fool, or stand in a slower group and get stuck behind all the walkers. Only one woman got in the 6-minute coral. Good for her. I bet she had a better race strategy than, "Just don't puke."

There was a countdown from 10, and then someone said, "I think the 10K start is separate," so we all stood there and waited patiently. Then the man with the bullhorn standing up the road yelled, "GO GUYS!" and the group collectively went, OH! He must mean us, and started running.

Mile 1:
Mile 1 was downhill and everyone started out fast. I just let the tide roll around me and concentrated on relaxing. I looked at my watch just long enough to verify that it was on, and then I am proud to say that I never looked at it again. The road was wide for awhile, so it didn't matter that we had to run through the entire 5K field, but when it turned off onto a narrow dirt path and a couple of guys formed a road block, I let the Bitch Voice out. "Please move aside to leat people through," I said as I crashed through the underbrush next to them. I still had a voice. That was good. That meant that, for now anyway, I probably wasn't going to puke. I ran past the first mile marker and a man with a watch yelled, "7:15!" Then I ran through another mile marker and another man yelled, "7:25." Now, looking at my watch (but not at the time), it says I ran the first mile in 6:55. All those times were too fast, but I knew that I had been headed downhill, so I could expect to slow down in the next mile.

Mile 2:
Now we were coming uphill. Not so severely uphill that you might even call it a hill, but uphill enough that if you carried your momentum in from the downhill and tried to keep charging at the same speed, you would probably puke. "Relax," I told myself. "Listen to your breathing." A few songs about breathing or not worrying –none of which I liked– flashed in my head, but mostly I just repeated the words, "relaxed" and "supple" in my head. As I came up on the 2-mile mark a man yelled something that I couldn't understand. Then he was silent. You nitwit, I thought. But I didn't look at my watch, and I kept the Bitch Voice in my head and out of my mouth. Later inspection of my watch clocked this mile at 7:39. Not too bad. This mile would be different on the second loop.

Mile 3:

We climbed another little rise, and hit a water station. I grabbed a cup and aimed for my mouth. I missed. I must learn to drink from Dixie cups. Fast runners who do not run with water bottles do not throw all of their water on their chests. Then we rounded a hairpin bend, and it was back downhill to the finish. A man at the 3-mile sign yelled, "22:45," but I'd lost track of whether he was the 5K guy or the 10K guy. Watch tells me this mile was 7:11. If I had stopped my race right here and run across the finish line, I would have won the 5K overall. Instead I bypassed the rainbow balloon arch and set out for the second loop.

Mile 4:

Suddenly the course was much less crowded, and most of the people I could see up ahead were going close enough to my pace to seem out of my reach. Without rabbits to catch, the miles dragged longer. There was one guy I passed, and then I could hear him sitting on my shoulder. He gave me comfort. As long as he didn't pass me, I probably wasn't slowing down. We talked about the weather, and then we hit the bottom of the hill again. Suddenly I regretted saying the few sentences I did about the heat and sun. All of a sudden I was sitting on The Puke's shoulder, and if I sped up, I would soon be grabbing my knees on the side of the road while the clock ticked on without me. When I ran past the next mile marker, the guy's watch was hanging uselessly from his elbow as he clapped and cheered for us. Nitwit. Later, the watch reveals that I ran this lap in 7:13.

Mile 5:
Better I didn't know my time, because I would only lose a few seconds by relaxing my pace, but I could (and had before) lost minutes by puking at the side of the road. As I headed into the hill, I had to choose between an uneven rocky section of the trail, or a flat, smooth part. The problem was that the guy just over my shoulder was on the smooth part, and I didn't want to trip him. He was my guardian angel, and I didn't want to break his ankle. Eventually he let me in ahead of him, and I was glad that he didn't want to talk again, because now it was me and The Puke having a very involved conversation. When I passed the next mile marker just before the top of the hill, the watch guy shouted "37:27." It seemed that I had lost some time, but right now I was so hot and thirsty, and The Puke was shouting so loud at me that I didn't really care where the time had gone.

Mile 6:

And then I was coming to the top of the hill where the water stop was, and there was... A HOMELESS MAN with a bike packed with mountains of stuff blocking the whole entire water station. I'm thirsty, motherfucker! Only in San Francisco! The volunteers were handing him water. I muttered something to the guy over my shoulder about how a homeless man was going to keep me from getting my water, and then The Bitch Voice came out. "Move around him!" I yelled to the volunteer. The volunteer did a great job of dodging the hobo's rig and handed me my cup. I threw it at my chest. Damn. Then it was time to come around the hairpin turn when, leisurely as you please another homeless guy stepped right in our path. Me, the guy behind me, and The Puke all almost crashed into him. "Look out!" Bitch Voice yelled. "On your right," the more polite guy yelled behind me. We both missed him by a fraction of an inch. On to the final mile marker where the guy was yelling, "44:45, 44;50..." So much for a sub-45-minute race. Oh well. Right now I just had to beat The Puke to the finish.

Mile 6.2
And then there was a goddamned CYCLIST in the way, swerving down the finishing chute at a slower pace than the runners were running. She needed to get from the right curb to the left side of the road, but she would need to cut across the course to do it, and I didn't trust her to hold her bike straight while she looked over her shoulder. I decided to make it someone else's problem. This sounded like a job for The Bitch Voice. "Stay right, coming through!" I yelled as I dashed around her. Let her ruin someone else's finish, at least I scared her out of my path.

I wanted to sprint into the finish, but I had The Puke to contend with. For the first time since the first quarter mile, people were passing me. But I didn't care. Let them pass me, I couldn't make up more than a second or two by now. And little did those suckers know I would probably puke down their backs the second we crossed the finish line. I finished in 46:36 by the official time, 46:25 by my watch, meaning that I ran the final .2 (.28 miles by my watch) in an underwhelming 7:06 pace.

As we lined up to hand in the tabs from the bottom of our bibs, I gave the volunteer a sign that meant, "I'm probably going to puke on you any second, no hard feelings, right, bub?" He gave me a look that could have meant, "No hard feelings, you're pretty badass if you ran hard enough to puke. And good on you for getting to the finish line before you did it," or his look could have meant, "What are you doing with your hands?"

The story has a happy ending, because I didn't puke. I won!

I wasn't sure if I actually had won something, so I stuck around an hour and a half for the awards ceremony. I wound up taking 4th overall, and I'm lucky I just turned 30 because if I'd been 29, then the overall winners would have taken up all the "Under 30" age group hardware as well and I would have been shit out of luck. As it was, I won my age group and walked back to the car with a gold medal hanging from a big, flaming, rainbow ribbon around my neck.

But as much chagrin as it gives me to be draped with a rainbow at a big, gay event, my heart swelled to see a high school kid who had also won his age group walking around with a big, gay rainbow around his neck too. I can say with some degree of certainty that this kid was straight, but he apparently thought nothing of turning up at a 5K, running it fast, and wearing his finisher's medal home. It was like he'd turned up at a race at the Knights of Columbus and was walking away with a red, white, and green ribbon around his neck. It seemed to affect his swagger that little. The fact probably wasn't lost on him that 90% of the field was gay, but it's not like someone might think he was gay by association. This is the most beautiful thing about San Francisco: not the fact that 10% of the city's population lived in a same-sex-relationship household in a recent census, not the fact that they fly rainbow flags down Market Street for the entire month of June, or that The Gays have as much of a presence in the city and its history as the Chinese, the Latinos, the hippies, and the crackheads. The most beautiful thing about San Francisco the fact that this straight teenaged boy could walk around in a rainbow ribbon and think no less of it than an Asian-American MIT student wearing a shamrock on St. Patrick's day. To me, that straight kid who wasn't worried about looking "gay" is what Pride is all about.