Cowboy Hazel

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.