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.

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.