On My First Race

The official race results haven't been posted yet, but I think that I crossed the finish line at around 31:45. That would make my pace 10:15/mile. Not as fast as I wanted, not as slow as I feared. I'm happy with it. My little conceit is that they were counting from the time of the start buzzer to your finish, not the time of your crossing the starting line to your finish. If they'd done it that way, I'd be down to about an even 31. Which is still slower than I was hoping. But I'm happy with it, considering my average pace when I'm out running is about 10:45/mile.

Here's a link to the race site: the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure. At this posting, the "teams" page is disabled or I'd leave link to mine. My Circ boss, who's an awesome boss, is a breast-cancer survivor, and I was on her and her daughter's team. Her daughter is also a breast-cancer survivor. I found them briefly before the start of the race and said hello, but I went to stretch and get a little water and didn't see them again for the rest of the time. Whoops. Sorry. Thanks Kathy!

I must say that I felt horribly out a place until about ten minutes into the actual running. As the rest of the folks on my team had opted to walk the course, I was on my own, and this seemed to be an oddity at the start line. Everybody had a buddy, even the crazy people that were wearing tiny super-shiny matching runner's outfits and jumping three feet in the air, kicking their own asses with their heels to stretch those quads. I tried very hard to turn away in time whenever somebody did that, lest my incredulous grin betray me for the novice that I am. It was amazing to watch though. Jump-whack! Jump-whack! Jump-whack!

As the time ticked down to the start buzzer, which was actually a somewhat nervous sounding air-horn, I tried to find a place near the back of the line of runners but before the walkers. This was more difficult than I had imagined as the two packs were smooshed together and over-lapping where they met. As one gentleman three or four people in front of me replied to his wife when she asked if maybe they shouldn't be in the back with the other people pushing baby-strollers, "ah, why bother? It'll sort itself out." Shortly after this, I stepped out of line and edged my way in a few yards or so ahead.

I did discover a trick that helped me determine a good place to start. Before the race, anyone that wished to be timed had to go to a little tent where they were handing out small black plastic do-hickies that you attached to your sneakers by lashing them to your shoelaces with little plastic cinch-straps. Like the kind police use on "Cops" when they run out of handcuffs. But smaller. Not, however, a lot smaller. I was left with a small plastic antenna sticking up off my sneaker that reached about five inches up my shin. I discovered after the race that they had a pair of little wire cutters to trim it up for you after you'd attached it and they just used longer cinches so that it was easier to maneuver the strap around your laces before you tightened it down. I, however, not wanting to appear the novice that I am, just let them scan my race tag, imprint the timer do-hicky to my race number and hand it over, before I quickly walked away like I assumed the in-the-know, Big People racers did. After the race was over and I was handing in my do-hicky, I was pleased to see that from the evidence of numerous tall plastic antennas jutting out from the pile of returned do-hickies, I was not the only newbie dork to have run the race.

The trick that I discovered about where to start was that the more serious you were about running, the more likely you were to have a strange do-hicky attached to your shoelaces and the closer you would be to the front. The less serious you were, the less likely you were to have a do-hicky and the further back you would be. Since my goal was to come in at less than 31 minutes (not quite achieved), I figured that I would be somewhere less than the front jump-to-kick-your-own-ass 5.30211 min/milers, but more than the middle I’m-here-for-the-beer-and-sausage 15 min/milers. Somewhere, I was guessing, where there was a mingling of mostly do-hickied sneakers and a few un-do-hickied sneakers but no baby strollers. Unless they were those suped-up, aero-dynamic, three-wheeled baby-strollers. I was going to stay the hell out of those people’s way. And I did.

I found a place to start that was a little further back than I might have aspired to, but this allowed me more of what I have discovered is, thus far in my experience, the greatest joy of racing: passing people. But it’s not just passing people. It’s dodging them.

At the blast of the air-horn, actually the third, the first two being sort of anemic and tentative, I started running. In place. We had to wait for those in front of us to clear out before we could even start to move. Then we got to move and pretend we were running. Kind-of like when a really tall man is “running” along with a very small child: the arms are pumping, the knees are going higher than they would if you were just walking, but your pace is about that of, well, a very small biped. Eventually, I worked up to a shuffle-run that was even slower than my regular long Sunday pace, and that was about the time that I finally crossed the start line.

At about five minutes in and having finally reached a speed that would be normal if I was just sort of taking it easy, it dawned on me that I could have started a little further towards the front. This was when I started noticing that I wasn’t just passing people (and being passed. Frequently), I was having to calculate trajectories and moments of impact and attempting to squeeze into what they call in the space shuttle launches “small windows of opportunity.”

How it would break-down was like this: let’s say that you’ve got someone on your left that’s running at the same speed as you, a group of three in front of you that are going slightly slower and up on the right, someone that is going much slower. You can’t go to the left because you smack into the person that’s keeping your pace, you can’t stay in place because you’ll smack into one of the three in front of you, and if you go to right, you’ll smack into the slow person before you can pass the ones in front. Your options then are to either slow down to the pace of the group until they pass the slow-poke or speed up and try to pass the group before they reach the slow-poke. The answer, of course, is to speed up. It’s a race, fer goodness sake! I didn’t hardly smash into anyone.

By about the fifteen-minute mark, the course had thinned out to the point that these calculations were not a constant thing but still something that one could look forward too with a reliable frequency.

What would amaze me was that even in the last half of the race, from time to time I would pass someone that looked like they were even less physically fit than me. There was a woman, at about the twenty minute mark, who had proportions vaguely similar to that of an egg, beginning at her head and ending at her knees. A largish egg. But she was still running. At the twenty minute mark. Now to really appreciate how amazing this is, you need to realize that we had all started at the same time and as I ran, I slowly increased my pace. I did the first mile in about 11:15, the second in about 10:30, and the last in about 9:30 (negative splits, thankyouverymuch). This means that at the twenty minute mark, around the time that I passed her, she had run a little more that 1.8 miles at a pace of about 10.75 min/mile. That’s a good Monday run for me. It’s sure as hell not easy for someone that tips out that scale at what the government would term “morbidly obese.”

My delight in the latter part of the race arose not just from such empathetic encounters however. There was the matter of smug glee that I experienced on the several occasions that I passed someone that was thin and in tight shiny pants that displayed their firm and shapely buttocks. Mind you, if I had firm and shapely buttocks, I’d probably wear those shiny pants constantly. Which is probably why God doesn’t let me. But the joy that I felt on those few occasions when I left ‘em in my dust was undeniably great and I will treasure them forever.

I did have a nemesis for the race, but as I saw him only briefly towards the front while we were lining up, I must assume that he beat me soundly. He ran without a shirt and had a ring through one nipple and a tattoo around the other. He was muscular, had a dangerously low body-fat index and was thoroughly tan. He could, more than likely, beat me up without breaking a sweat. He was, in other words, exactly what I would be if I were cool. I loathed him at first sight. Luckily, it was also the last. Pssht, I could have taken him. He probably doesn’t even know what an on-line library catalogue is, much less, know how to find the comic-book price-guide with it.

Of the babes that ran, there were many. But me, being me, was awkward and uncomfortable with that much hotness surrounding. I mean, seriously, if you had some confidence, a breast-cancer benefit run would be a great place to meet women. It might be slightly in bad taste, but still, I thought I’d put it out there. It’d be, you know, for a good cause too.

By the end of the race, I was tired and in a little pain. I had a blister spring up on my pinky toe, which I don’t think I’ve ever had happen before, and, FYI, if you really must wear the free, new, sorta-stiff cotton tee-shirt that they give you when you race, make sure you band-aid your nipples first. But the last leg was not without its vicariously malicious pleasures, as when the “in-shape” member of a group turned around to run backwards as he cam-corded the less fit members of his group as they, puffy-cheeked and slack-jawed, struggled towards the end and a kid of about 14 that was sprinting towards the finish-line almost took him out with a forehead to the crotch. That was pretty awesome.

After I’d passed through the finish arch/official timing thingy, gratefully received my free bottle of water, and turned in my timing do-hicky, I walked around to cool down and then found a tree to prop myself against while I stretched my calves. I did an abbreviated version of my cool down/stretching routine, the magic un-self-consciousness of running hard having already faded by the time I got to the part where I make myself look like a horribly diseased cat.

When I’d finished trying to avoid cramps while not looking like a diseased cat, I wandered into the tent area and got myself a free fruit/yogurt/walnut dish, which was really quite good, from the McDonald’s stand and then went over to the food tent where I got a free sausage in exchange for a little corner of my running tag. It was perforated for just this purpose, though it would have been funny to see a bunch of exhausted runners trying to tear off a piece of one of those neigh-indestructible bibs in exchange for some sort of sustenance, any sustenance.

After I’d eaten my sausage and wandered around a little more, never having found either my team again or the beer tent, I decided that I wanted to go home. I was tired. I felt good. And honestly, I really, really needed a cigarette.