Friday, June 3, 2011

Race Report: 2011 Chase Corporate Challenge Boston

It's been noted by a few people in the past 48 hours that I sound less than confident about my running. In my teenage years, I was not confident about most things. other than I would be a writer, and one day own a lightsabre (I'm 50% of the way there; now about that lightsabre). I grew out of a lot of that, as experience brings wisdom. I sometimes regret my lack of confidence in my youth, especially when it came to athletics. Sparky Anderson once famously said "pain don't hurt", and he's right; if I'd been less afraid of pain and some short term suffering, I might have flourished in areas I quickly dismissed.

My lack of confidence with running has been mostly a learned behavior, and it's one I need to work on breaking. Performances like last night will hopefully help me to continue to thwart that problem. It was a cool and breezy night, the opposite of last years event, and I was prepped for some suffering. I haven't been putting in a lot of distance lately, mostly pretty short runs. Nothing like a race to change all that.

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Me and my co-workers

I knew I couldn't run the whole thing and expect to make a good time, so I went with a 5 minute run/2 minute walk plan. This worked well until the halfway point, when I was feeling tired, so I switched to 5 minute run/3 minute walk. I followed this to precision until the last walk break, when I decided I wanted to put in everything I could, so I only walked 1 minute for the last break.

Last year I could have sworn I was faster than the 52:05 the chip timing said. I didn't have any electronics to go by, and I walked most of the race in hot, muggy conditions. Based on my experiences with hot races in the past year, I probably was closer to my official time than I thought. This year thankfully, I had my Garmin 305, and though I started it about 40 seconds early when I hit the very first timing mat, it worked very well. My official time this year was 47:35, and my Garmin was just off at 48:12, but showed the additional distance.

For a mostly flat course on a cool day, going about twice the distance I'm used to right now, I'm thrilled with the nearly 5 minute improvement over last years time. Most importantly, i wasn't the least bit tempted to just walk over to our house at the turnaround.


Notes:

- This weekend is the last big bike ride before the race: 55 miles. We may go down near the course to ride even, to get an idea of what it's like. 

- Read this entry on Rach's blog about how we got screwed by our gym. No more access to FitRec, a month earlier than they said we would be shut out.

- I'm now a mere $683 from finishing my fundraising. It's nice to be making such good progress.

4 comments:

  1. You did the right thing by breaking down the race into walk/run segments. There's no point in going super hard when there are bigger events on the horizon. Plus, you had no intention of quitting, so while you might not be where you want to be (or need to be) with your running, at least you can continue on getting stronger and faster from here.

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  2. Way to kill it. I hope the ride goes great this weekend. I'm riding 41 tomorrow and am pumped about it!

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  3. Thanks gang!

    Edie - You're right, as much as I occasionally get bummed that Im not already a 10/mi runner, it's still a good bit of progress this year. I just need to make it a priority.

    Derek - Thanks bud! I hope your ride went great!

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