Race Day!

I just love races.  I get all amped up and nervous days before just like when I was a kid.  It’s a whole bag of jumbled feelings in my stomach.  Confident anticipation wrapped up in a layer of doubt, wrapped in fear of the pain that’s going to come, wrapped in gratitude for having the chance to race.  I guess those things make your adrenal glands pump, because I can feel them pumping!

This weekend was my first race of the Outdoor Track season and would be my first crack at the 1500 since I totally hosed up my last one.  As a reminder,  last July I had gotten some decent training weeks in after recovering from some broken ribs, so I felt like I could beat the 5:16 I had run the month before.  I set my sights on something close to 5:00 even though all of my training really told me that 5:10 would’ve been a bit of a stretch.  Then I pulled a rookie mistake and went out way too fast, because I just felt so good.  I should’ve hit my first 400 meters in about 1:20 or so, but instead came around at 1:12.  About a lap later I was overdosing on lactic acid and fell all apart.  Finished in 5:24. Stupid mistake.  And one that gets made by many, many runners.

This year I’ve trained a lot smarter, avoided barrel rolling a golf cart, and knew I was faster than last year.  I had also learned my lesson and started doing my longer training runs the way the best coaches tell us to do them.

Start slower than your goal pace.  Then accelerate throughout the run.

It’s amazing how well that works, and I’ve been preaching it as a tactic ever since.

So for this race I was confident I could get down around 5:00 and with a little luck maybe break into the fours which is my “big goal” for this year.  To hit 5 minutes I need to average 1:20 per 400 meters.  My training paces and my workouts were telling me I could do that, although I wasn't quite sure how I was going to feel putting almost four of those back to back.  Still, I knew my goal pace and I wasn’t going to blow that up in the first lap this year.

Because of my nerves I must’ve written down my splits three different times and I spent the entire day before the meet running the race through my head and saying, “20 seconds at the first turn, 40 coming out to the straight, 60 seconds at the finish line with 3 to go, then 1:20 at the next turn.  Don’t go under 1:20 unless the first 100 was a little fast.”  After that I was just going to look at every 200 meters to make sure I was staying on pace.  2:20 at the 700 meter with two laps to go.  Then 3:00 flat, and 3:40 with one lap to go.  If I could hold on to that pace I’d be right at 5 minutes flat.  I had no idea what I’d feel like at that moment, but I told myself that no matter what when I hit the turn with one to go I was going to surge for 50 meters at least to get a good start on that last 400.  Had to do it.  No excuses.

Friday night I took one last look at my training plan from McMillan Running and decided to check out the articles they suggested about mentally preparing for a race.  One proved particularly helpful and it was about handling the “No Go Zone.”  That’s the third quarter of every race no matter the distance and it’s where runners drop the ball out of fear all the time.  We used to call the third lap in the Mile “Bizzarro World” because it was just the weirdest, disrupting thing.  You’ve all felt it, too, in 5K's up to Marathons.  It’s the moment you realize you’ve hit “only” the half-way point and you’re already feeling tired.  You’re not going to make it at this pace, so you’d better conserve a little to finish strong.  Bingo.  Precious seconds of race time tick away.

I re-read the article, committed pieces to memory so I could tell myself what to do when my body started telling me to “conserve” a little.

When I had warmed up, put on my racing spikes and stepped up to the line with my finger on my watch I was ready to roll.  I was nervous, but focusing hard on the plan and hoping to see sub-5 at the end of it.

We all took off as the gun sounded and two guys kind of jumped out.  The strides I had just done as warm ups were done at my race pace, so I knew I was a little fast but not much.  I dropped into third and sort of felt like I was coasting as we went by the first 100 right at 18 seconds.  We rounded the turn and the first place guy began to stretch it out, but my pace felt right so I stuck to the guy in front of me.  We got to the first 200 right on 40 seconds and heard the “three to go” call dead on 60 seconds.  We had slowed a little but I was right on pace and felt like I was barely making an effort at that point.   And that pace held nicely as I hit the next split perfectly at 1:40.  I was kind of excited that I was feeling so good and had this big guy in front of me to take the headwind that was coming up on the home stretch part of the track, but then he started to really slow down.  I began to step around him, but thought I’d give him the next 100 meters and take advantage of the draft.

We hit the line at 2:27.  Suddenly I was behind pace by 7 freaking seconds!  I jumped to the outside and moved around him.  Here I was in Bizzarro World, beginning to breathe a little hard and I HAD to accelerate.  After that last, slow 200 just holding onto my goal pace was going to feel very fast.  I followed the suggestions in that article and once I felt like I was back on pace I focused on just holding the cadence.  It took a little more effort as described, but not much more.  I hit the next turn at 3:06 or 7 which meant I was hitting the pace just right, but my shot at 5 flat was going away quick.  I decided to start pushing a little even though I had 600 more meters to go.  This time by when they guy shouted, “one to go!” I found I had only gained one measly second and I was at 3:46.  As planned I surged my way into the turn and immediately felt the rising tide of fatigue kicking in.  It’s funny how I’m beginning to actually feel the lactic acid build up in my muscles.

Because it’s running and you’re breathing so hard it feels differently than say, when you’re doing pushups to the point of failure.  In pushups you kind of click along at an even pace for a whole bunch then all of a sudden you just can’t pop up like you had been and you realize you’ve got maybe 5 more reps in you and the last couple are going to take forever or not even happen.  With all the oxygen deprivation going on it comes on a little subtler with running, but keeps accelerating getting worse and worse.  I swear it gets “louder” the longer I try to keep pushing at that point.  It’s like I can’t hear as much around me or even see as well because everything in me is focusing down on the pain instead of out on the track.

Well surging into that turn I felt my thighs really heat up, my stomach tighten and my arms get heavy.  I stopped accelerating, but didn’t slow down.  I tried to just hold the faster pace until I got to the last turn and focused on gulping down air deep; imagining my back and stomach flaring out to get as much oxygen as possible into my body so my muscles would have something besides themselves to burn up.  I didn’t look at my watch with 200 to go, because I was just hurting too much and besides, what was I going to learn about at that point?  It was hard enough just see the lanes ahead of me and the next split was the one that really mattered.

That last 100 was hard work.  That’s all it was.  Painful, exhausting but somehow still fast feeling.  I didn’t really get rubber legged until the last few strides but I was home then, so it didn’t matter.

I stopped my watch as I leaned across the line and stumbled up a few strides to get out of the way of the other runners coming in.  I was thinking my last lap had to be faster than 1:20 when I looked down and saw 5:01.

 

 

Damn.  So close!

But even while I was gasping and trying not to hork just then, I realized that made my last 400 a 1:15! Now that’s better than I was expecting and I knew it was because I had not gone out too fast.  Of course I did go way too slow at that one point in the first half of the race, but think about how that pans out.  If I had hit the 1100 meter mark at 3:40 as planned I would only have had to run a 1:21 to get the exact same time I just got by gutting out that 1:15.  I could’ve run a 1:19 and broken 5 minutes!  Of course I know that means I would have run a faster 1100 by six seconds, but those six seconds probably wouldn’t have made me feel that much different.  I would have put out the same effort in my final lap, struggled just as much, and probably would’ve been a little slower.  But I COULD’VE been slower and still wound up with a faster final time.

It’s all about pace and splits.  And of course the training.

Over the next couple of months I’ll continue to focus on those Lactate Turners which will push off that exhaustion feeling another 50 to 100 meters or so, and I know I’ll get down under that 5 minute mark and achieve something I thought was just a target to shoot for, not something I would really ever do.