10K races really hurt. Whenever I have a 10K coming up that weekend, I start getting this creeping sense of revulsion and dread starting around Wednesday. I feel revulsion because I know that I’ll feel like my insides are rotting out after the first mile, I’ll spend the next 3 miles feeling like I’m going to poop my pants, and I’ll spend the last 2.2 miles hoping that I can hold down the puke until the finish line. I feel dread because I know that I simply do not have the self-control or pace awareness to prevent this pain, so I know with absolute certainty that I will be suffering acutely for 30 min.
One day I realized, Claire, there’s no reason to be scared. You can’t run any faster than you can run. So just run within yourself, stay at an intensity where you can breathe, and you won’t have to suffer for more than a couple of minutes at the end. It was freeing for the first mile and a half as I paced my steps to my breath and tried to run within my ability. And then my intestines threw up their hands in frustration and tried to flee my body through my butt hole.
The problem is that if you’re racing a 10K properly, you should be sitting right at your VO2 max, but it takes a few minutes for a too-fast pace to hit your heart rate and nervous system. Reach so much as a toenail over that red line, and you will NEVER get your oxygen debt and lactate levels back under control unless you seriously cut back on your pace. But there is always some bitch in pink just ahead of you, and she may beat you, but you just can’t let her go without puking on her shoes. So you have no choice but to pickle there in your self-loathing, lactate, and half-digested chime.
Which is just a long-winded way of saying that I really wasn’t looking forward to the 10K this weekend. If I could think of any other way to benchmark my fitness that didn’t hurt, I would have done that instead. I didn’t feel up to racing a half marathon yet, and hey, the registration was only $34. I didn’t think I could be any more unenthused, but then I found out that it was going to rain on race day for the first time in over a month. Awesome.
When I showed up the air and ground were all moist (one of the more disgusting words in the world), but the rain held off until I was done warming up and had dropped my sweats in the car. Then, I huddled under one of the tents like a peevishly wet stray cat waiting for the race to start. It rained harder by the minute.
In Boston, races like this draw a pretty even split of serious runners and the “group hug” types, but in California the Oprah crowd dominates the small events. Usually the slower crowd is somewhat inspiring (it is indubitably harder to run for 75 minutes than for 45). I do miss having a number of superior athletes to motivate me, but normally being a minority of people running without a feather boa doesn’t bug me. However, on this day when a group of about 20 “women of a certain age” (and a certain weight) in matching XL t-shirts with some “girl power” slogan threw their arms around each other and started a 90-second-long breast-thumping chant that went something like “We are the Mighty Twats, we run because we don’t give a shit that we run 12-minute-miles!” I just about lost it.
Finally it seemed close enough to the start time for me to step out from the Mighty Twats’ shelter and stand in the exposed starting corral. I scanned the other runners to see who I thought would be running faster than me, whose way I should get out of, and who I thought I could pace off of in those uncertain first minutes when you’re establishing your rhythm (usually a straight man over 50 is my most reliable metronome).
- The clump of kids so close to the starting line that they were leaning over it: no need to get in front of them, they’ll take off like a rocket, and by the time they poop out and I catch up with them, the group will have already thinned out. The nice thing about getting around pooped out kids is that their elbows aren’t right at my face height like the grown-ups I usually wind up passing in the first half mile.
- That tall chick with the gorgeous legs that looks like she stole them from an athletic mannequin in the Nike department: I could pretty much count on not seeing her until the finish line.
- That chick around my age with no pink on that looked like one of those Boston mommy athletes that would rip your legs off and still have the energy to carry her 2 toddlers over the finish line: I figured I could hang with her for the first mile or two until things got real.
I picked out a handful of 50-something white guys with unironic mustaches that would probably wind up running a similar pace in case I needed human metronomes and waited for the MC to finish his little pre-race speech.
“It’s a good day for a PR,” he said. “The course is mumblemumblemumble…” Hang on! Did he just say the course was half a mile short?!?!?! That would be uh-MAZE-ing! I wasn’t going to complain if they wanted to make this torture any shorter. He yammered on and on as we got wetter and wetter, and only when we were already thoroughly soaked and a little purple did he lead the kids in a count-down from 10.
I started timing my breaths to my steps, and counting down from 100 and tried not to get elbowed in the face or stuck behind someone who would slow my roll. Within the first mile I had passed all but one of the kids, I was running right off the shoulder of the kick-ass woman with the New England face, and could see the woman with the amazing legs up ahead. Out of nowhere one of the straight men over 50 with an unironic mustache sitting right behind me said, “You’re like a machine. Every time I look you’re sitting right between 6:50 and 6:55.”
“Shut up! You’re not supposed to tell me!” I whined. The spell was broken. I wished that I could elbow him in the face. I was no longer just focusing on my breath and my steps, now I knew how fast I was going and the inner dialogue became, This is what 6:50 pace feels like. Is this too fast? Can I maintain this? Does this hurt? Am I in trouble? Can I keep up with this? Are these people too fast for me? Maybe I can catch the lady with the amazing legs! She’s wearing pink… “But the key is to maintain it over the whole thing…” said the straight man over 50 with an unironic mustache. Thanks a lot, douche bag. I’d never thought of doing that. Ass hat! He trailed off mid-advice because I murdered him.
Me and Kick-Ass New England Face had been slowly reeling in the lady with the legs that won’t quit over the second mile, and when she slowed up on a short incline we both passed her in quick succession. Alright, it’s true. She’d been wearing pink, and I’d probably been running too fast to catch her. Between the hill, the ass hat with the unironic mustache’s coaching, and losing my visual pacing benchmark I fell out of my rhythm and let the ass hat (who I had not muredered after all) and New England face pull ahead. Now I was all alone in the world.
I had planned not to look at my watch until I had caught that one last kid up ahead, but the kid was still up there, and pulling further and further away. If he had made it almost 3 miles without crapping out, he probably wasn’t ever going to. Incredible! He couldn’t have been older than 9 years old! I knew that there were some fast kids out there, but I’d never seen one that could maintain that kind of speed over such a long course. (Update: He was actually 10, and finished in under 6:40 pace.) I’ve been seeing more and more kids keeping pace with their parents in races longer than 5K. I wonder if more children finding their way to running sooner with help the US find its way back to being a distance running superpower again. I was surprised when I hit the turn-around to see several of the kids that I’d passed at the start not far behind me and still running as well. These kids clearly had the experience not to try to race the whole thing, and the fitness to run continuously for almost an hour.
I, on the other hand, was having some trouble. When I did eventually look at my watch (set to heart rate), it said 177 bpm. I hadn’t raced with a heart rate monitor in a long time (ever), but based on what I had seen in training, that seemed too high. Too high indeed. When I fall apart, there always seems to be an outside factor that causes it: a gust of wind, a small incline, having to speak, having to smile at someone, an unusually large tuft of grass in my field of vision… all things that are tremendously unjust impositions that I could not be foreseen and am a victim of. I’m running along fine, and then all of a sudden, I have to step up onto a curb and then all of my strength and composure fall away and suddenly it feels like I’m running on Jupiter where gravity is like 25x what it is on Earth. In that race, the evil force was a short, quarter-mile detour onto a dirt path made of deep, soft epoxy. This detour was obviously included in the course to cause me to give up my life force and crawl into the dry riverbed and die.
When I got back onto the main trail again, I could hear footsteps behind me. I tried for a few moments to hold off the footsteps closing behind me, but what was the use? I still had about 2 miles to hold myself together, and I would rather not be THAT uncomfortable. I was wheezing and hacking, but breakfast was behaving unbelievably well and staying right where I left it: on the inside. I wondered who would come around on the feet I was listening to, and to my dismay, it was the chick with the legs that wouldn’t quit. And she looked perky. She flashed a gigantic smile at me and some “You go grrrl” type encouragement and ran on ahead. I hoped that she was really, really, fast so that I wouldn’t be tempted to put myself in any further discomfort by chasing her down.
From then on, there wasn’t much else to report. Had I been in Boston with the deeper fields, I would have at least had other people around me, but as it was I just had Legs’s pink back gradually getting smaller in my field of vision. She finished 21s ahead of me… I could have pulled that out of my ass I suppose, but it was raining and also I didn’t care that much. And also it’s easier to not try and say you could have than to try and find out you can’t.
As I came back into the field where the finish was, the 5K runners were rejoining the course from the right and spectators with cameras were blocking my way. I almost gave an elbow shiver to some proud mommy, and wasted my final breaths on screaming something like, “Move, bitch!” (pronounced, “Excuse me!”). I managed a pathetic little kick up to 6 min/miles in the finishing corral, so I clearly didn’t leave it all out there. I crossed the finish line, stared into the garbage can for a minute to make sure that I didn’t need to puke, and left.
I had pulled off third woman overall, and second in my age group. There was probably hardware in there somewhere, but it was raining and I had a massage/hot tub to get to.
Remind me to tell you about the last time I left without a trophy… Funny story...
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