Chinatown Firecracker 10k (Read 529 times)

I feel like I should be getting a reputation around here for poor race planning. First race, I wax the car in the sun and wind up sunburned and sore before a nighttime 10k. Next I fail to set my alarm for a 5k, arrive late and wind up with a glorious 51: xx gun time. This time I registered for a 10k on Feb. 8, 2009 back in December. A week and a half ago my boyfriend and I decided to have a housewarming party (we moved in last July) "A week from Saturday". Lo and behold, someone looks at a calendar on Tuesday and realizes that we have planned our beer-soaked sugarfest for the night before a race. There's nothing to be done by then, so we shrug and decide we won't get super tanked or anything. Well, the party was awesome. All our friends came and brought us housewarming booze, so I'm pretty sure we have more now than when they all showed up, and we'd baked zillions of cookies and we all ate cookies and drank a bunch and went to bed by 2am. Though I made sure to have a big glass of water first. Amazingly, we were up at 6, made the coffee, had some breakfasty snacks and got out the door by 7. On the way I apologized to my boyfriend for dragging him into this, and he sort of muttered that it was okay or something. We pay $7 to park in a lot that advertises $3.50 parking because we are being price-gouged, but there's 5,000 people in a three-block radius and the parking dudes are clearly just following the law of supply and demand. I dropped off the boyfriend closer to the start of the 5k, which starts earlier than the 10k, and manage to park and then jog to his start before he's off. He somehow fails to notice the crazy waving person in the bright green hoodie for a while but finally looks over at me just as the hype-man is counting down to the gun. Since the 5kers are off, I head to the porta-potties since I've got half an hour. Fun fact: I am terrible at choosing lines. No matter what, I will always choose the slowest possible line to get in. This is no exception. I look at my watch. Something must be horribly wrong here. I ponder that if these people run as slowly as they pee, surely I'll place in my age group. (Spoiler: I don't.) Sure enough, while most lines split into two porta-potties, someone in my line was polite or something and now the line next to us has three potties and we have one. Just as I'm working this out, a middle-aged brusque hippie type (you know, followed the grateful dead for years but now owns a successful online hemp jewelry business) goes to the front, explains this to everyone, and goes back to the end of the line. I love this man immensely. If someone's not fast enough to get in a pottie, he shouts encouragement from his place in line. He is fantastic. When it's my turn, I am ON IT. What, you thought this would be about running or something? There are no corrals or anything, so I sort of eyeball where I think I'll be. It's between the middle-aged women who look like they might be "fitness walkers" and some annoying teenagers who I think will surely be too busy texting (or whatever the kids are doing these days) to beat me. I notice a woman wearing a shirt from the last year of the half I'm running in May and hope that my shirt this year is better. The entire time I'm standing here, I'm staring at the hill I'm going to get to run up in a few minutes. I spend a while telling myself that it is totally not that big. And now for my favorite part of the race: the hype man hypes! Everyone cheers! There's a countdown! The gun goes off! And. We. Stand. There. Then we kinda do the race-start-shuffle, and finally after 2 or 3 minutes I get across the mat. The first mile is kind of uneventful. It's vaguely uphill, people are being obnoxious and cutting me off, and who let the middle schoolers come, anyway? They are like four feet tall. Shouldn't they be running the kids' race? To the left, Dodger's Stadium Hill of Doom. To the right, the scenic warehouse district of Los Angeles. All around me, twelve year olds wearing garbage bags even though it's cloudy at best and I think the sun's coming out. Right before mile two we get heading uphill. For a while it's realy not that bad, just uphill enough that it's definitely uphill but I can handle it. Over on the side I see a girl throwing up. People start sprinting in front of me and then stopping to walk and I nearly knock over one lady who does this. There's a guy on a bike who is neither a race official nor a police officer, but apparently just a jerk who wanted a nice scenic bike ride through the middle of 3,000 runners. I pass him and feel totally self-righteous about it. At the beginning of mile three or so (there were no mile markers so these are wild guesses, by the way), there's a slight downhill. Everyone leaps to a full run, and I speed up a bit, but I have looked at the elevation chart obsessively and know that the worst is yet to come. It is. Finally the hill gets serious in the last climb, and after breavely battling it out about 3/4 of the way to the top and swearing off running forever and ever, I stop and agree to powerwalk for two minutes. I note that I am certainly powerwalking faster than I was running. Le sigh. I crest the hill during this two-minute powerwalk and sweet googly moogly, the downhill portion of the day begins. Aside from one or two uphills blips, that's the rest of the race. I turn up the pace and the ipod and start passing people. Miles 3, 4 and 5 all kind of blur together in a speedy, pleasant blur. At some point my best running buddy Ribcage Cramp showed up, and that was fun. I swear I will do more situps next week. At the waterstops, it's pretty clear I'm not the only one bad at planning, because they are out of dixie cups and my slow ass is only about 3/5 of the way back. So people are drinking straight from the gallon jugs, and I'll admit it: I did too. I was really thirsty. I hope the person in front of me didn't have Ebola or something. These miles of the race were lovely but somewhat uneventful. Great views of Los Angeles, running down a wide boulevard between palm trees with the mountains in the distance. This is why I moved here, right? There's one final hill around mile 5, and right before it I start chatting with a super-friendly fellow runner in a blue shirt about how big that hill was, how much this final hill will suck and how absolutely insane people who run marathons are. Blue shirt dude starts walking toward the top of the hill, which has drummers at the top. I'm still running, but when I get close to the top, they STOP DRUMMING. HEY. I DID NOT SAY THAT YOU COULD STOP DRUMMING I'M STILL RUNNING HERE. Going pleasantly downhill again, it occurs to me that I heard Hype Guy tell the 5k runners that the drummers were at the two-mile mark. I do some math-fu and determine that I'm about a mile from the finish. My watch says 55 or 56 or something. I had pipe dreams of a 60 minutes 10k earlier since there were no mile markers and I got all optimistic, but now they are shattered. SHATTERED. The final stretch of the race is mainly along the freeway, which is lovely since I happen to having practiced running under the freeway approximately eight times a week. I charge forth. I careen down a hill because I am still working on that whole "downhill technique" thing. I round a corner and there's Chinatown, so I bust a move i like to call the "0.2 mile sprint." So does everyone else and they all pass me. Where the crap is the finish? The finish is right up there, right? This is called the .2 mile sprint because that is exactly how long I can maintain it for, you know. Finally I see the stupid finish line, and a hundred feet before it, the boyfriend! He gives me a thumbs-up I high-five him on the way past, and then also high-five the super enthusiastic asian man standing next to him. My clock time is 1:12 something, and in all the hubbub I forget to stop my watch until after I take off the shoe chip, so it says 1:12 something too. I have no idea whether I managed my goal time of 1:10 or not. I shove my way through the crowd, grab two water bottles from someone offering them to me, and find the boyfriend. As we're wandering into the expo fray looking for free stuff, I see a sign that says "beer garden." It's more like a beer alley, and the stupid fast people took all the regular Budweiser, but we take cans of Bud Light anyway (and no, it's not even 10 yet) and drink them standing next to fifty other runners. I kinda like these people. Afterwards we look around for free stuff, but it's totally insane and crowded so we just go for dim sum instead so that we can undo all the hard work we just did. Initially I feel bad about showing up disgusting and sweaty, but then I realize that the restaurant is about 2/3 full of runners eating dim sum, and I feel less bad. It is tasty, and soy sauce gives you electrolytes or something, right? We watch the people next to us get chicken feet, and muse that those were not even offered to us. Also, I think I'm pretty good with chopsticks generally, but dim sum makes me feel like a chopstick idiot because it's so hard. Here's a rough outline of my last 24 hours: Cookies Booze Running Beer Dim Sum It's sort of symmetrical. I like it. It also makes me feel like I'm doing my 20's right. And now to cut the suspense: I came in at 1:10:34, so not quite. But it's about a 13 minute PR so I'm not gonna complain. However I may not be walking tomorrow.

Too funny! And congrats on the PR!

Congrats Alex!

Congratulations and great race report! You have a wonderful sense of humour. I'd like suggest that we insist on the inclusion of fashion reports, though.

I'd like suggest that we insist on the inclusion of fashion reports, though.

Ha! Okay, since it was "only" about 53 at the start, I was wearing a tech top and a green cotton t-shirt-weight hoodie over capri-length tights. I felt super self-conscious about the tights for a while, since it's not like I ever just hang out in them, but then I got there and EVERYONE was wearing unflattering tights, so it was cool. Thanks everybody! I think I may run another in April (With Dragon! And Ilene!) and I'm assuming it's dead flat since it's on the beach. I'm kicking 1:10's ass then.

Squeaky, No pressure, but any chance you could...ummm...run more races so we can have more of your race reports?

I second this! Nice job in spite of yourself! ha ha!

Love you girlfriend for keeping the whole life/running balance in line. Great report. There's always time in the future for PR. Enjoy the ride.

LOVE YOUR RR"S!!! Congrats Alex on the PR!!!