Rough day out in Brooklyn today. I finished with a new personal record by 13 seconds (1:27:17 was the official time), but I was anticipating a much bigger improvement. More importantly, I was expecting myself to run a better race. Instead of running hard the whole 13.1, I just sort of gave up the second half when it started to get tough. I’m not sure why, but I just didn’t push as hard as I should have. As a result, I finished feeling like I still had plenty left in the tank — not a good feeling to have after running a half-marathon.
It’s funny, when I got back home and turned on the computer, I saw that Joe Garland had written a post on his blog about Going All In. I’d been trying put into words what I was feeling, but couldn’t until I read this:
Putting these two things together, it dawned on me that the point of this whole racing business is to go All In. We put everything on the line, everything that we’ve trained for and all the effort that has been put into that training for the shot of winning the brass ring of reaching the goal. And that can be really scary.
By the minutes and seconds, some would say that my race today was good. But I will never call it a good race because I didn’t go all in. I’ve been feeling really bad about that lack of effort all day. Even worse, I know that bad feeling is not going away anytime soon. My soonest chance for redemption doesn’t come until the NYC Half on August 16th. So, for the next two-and-a-half months, I’m going to prepare myself mentally to race with intensity, as I failed to do today in Brooklyn.
Moral of today’s story: An hour and twenty-five minutes of pain is a hell of a lot shorter than two months of wandering What if?.
Also, I decided officially that I’m not running the San Francisco marathon. I had been seriously considering it, but don’t think that I’ll be ready to run it to the best of my potential (it’s in 8 weeks) and I really need my next race to be a good one after this disappointment.
Now a bit about the race itself: It sucked. This was, hands down, the worst NYRR race that I’ve ever run. The baggage drop-off was incredibly far from the starting line and there were huge lines there. Luckily, Antonio offered to wait through it and drop off my bag because I desperately had to go to the bathroom before the start. That line took over 20 minutes! Seriously. I timed it. How can you not plan for people needing to use the bathrooms before a race? There’s 11,000 people running — you’re probably gonna need more than 30 porta-potties. Once I finally did get into the chute (at 7:59), I got stuck at the back of the first (blue) corral and ended up fighting through horrible crowds of slow runners the entire first mile. I wasted so much energy dodging groups of people jogging through their first mile even though they were wearing the blue bibs too. The first corral really needs to be subdivided some more. It just doesn’t work to have such a wide range of paces clumped all together like that. And, I’ve saved the worst for last: We had to do almost a full lap of the park on the outside of the the slower runners. There was no divider on the inside, so they were stretching out into our “lane” and often completely blocking our paths. I was exhausted by the time I left the park, and not because of my pace.
I’m happy to report that today wasn’t all bad news — At the end of the race, I ran into Baker (who I hadn’t seen for almost a year) and then grabbed a few beers with him and Antonio on the boardwalk as we watched the rest of the runners finish up the race. There is nothing quite so nice as being able to drink a socially acceptable beer at 9:30 in the morning, especially on a beautiful sunny day out on the beach.
What you should do is go into the bathroom, look in the mirror, and give yourself a slap upside the head.
You just ran a marathon. When I say people should only do two a year it’s five months of training and one month of recovery. Chicago coming up and you did so much physically and mentally for Delaware that let both sides recover. So you got half-way through the race and decided to shut it down. No what-ifs about it. Enjoy this interregnum period.
I know what it’s like to beat yourself up over race results. I sometimes do it during the race (”why do I bother doing this?”). It can be a great motivator. A few more weeks of taking it easy and then you can start worrying again. Not just yet.
I appreciate the citation. But this was not an “all in” race for you.
echo what he said. racing–to say nothing for returning to fast training paces as you have–so soon after a marathon is, quite frankly, not the wisest decision. chill. get off the feet and log some easy miles. take the full month of june to slowly build up and recover completely; you won’t lose that much fitness. and then when you do get back to training seriously for the fall, mix in some slower distance. you run mp or faster an awful lot … way too much imho. you are a prime candidate to see a big boost by laying off the gas more often. get in good efforts twice a week or so, go long once, and do the rest of your mileage at a cakewalk pace. otherwise, you’ll flame out going like this. just an observance.
You PRed!!!! Which means you really did rock! I know the disappointment of wishing you could have done more, but it is what it is and you still did well. Be proud of your accomplishment and set your sights ahead to the next race.
I agree with Joe. You can’t count this as all-out since you already gave your all-out a couple weeks ago in the marathon. Your body still needs some time to recover. You still PR’d which meant that you’re already running this distance better than you had before. Besides, it was a difficult race in so many ways (some of which you’ve pointed out) so to expect a perfect result is not being realistic! Enjoy your PR and recover well. Two months goes by quickly when you’re training for a goal race.
Congratulations on the PR! It was my first half and I loved every second of it.
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Awesome run man! Next time, maybe I’ll piggy-back you and get myself a completely unrealistic PR! Hope to see you if the meetup works in July!!
BW
Thank you for the honest comments, guys. I’m still not real happy with how things went yesterday, but I’m doing my best to take a step back, relax and regroup instead of dwelling on the past.
Well if Joe’s comment doesn’t help I can always swing by and meat punch you for extra measure :P
Yous a crazy one ;-) CONGRATS!
i agree it wasnt the best race either- but we (the 3 of us) did great overall. I made a PR too… AND, on the last mile when you passed me it helped speed me along! Although, maybe it was because i knew we would be able to grab beers as soon as we finished?!? lets rock out some serious distance runs in the next week or two.
[...] This is a frustrating, humbling sport. In recent weeks a couple of fellow bloggers — Cowboy Hazel and Laminator (who has a nice Q&A Series going as well on back-to-back marathons, [...]