SMAC track 2014, pt 1

David didn't really want to run the 3200 (b/c his goal is the 1600 on Sat), but he ran it. He started in front, but then dropped back to second pack for much of the race. Jeremy Hall led for quite a while. With about 500 to go -- Trent & Jeremy had fallen out of lead and a Leonardtown kid (I think) was leading -- David took the lead and pulled a safe gap to win just under 10.

The girls 3200 was the stupendous race. I'm not sure what the girls 3200 SMAC record was. I thought it was a PHS girl in 11:3x or so. One online site says Caroline Parris in 11:32.

Anyway, Hayley (Jackson) pulled ahead in the first 50, and opened up a big gap. Several laps in, there were three packs. #1: Hayley, #2: Hannah, #3: Everyone else.  It was funny that everybody was still together, with Hannah (Aris) off the front, and Hayley away and gone.

Hayley came in at 10:47, lapping everyone except Hannah, over whom she had about a 300m lead.

One of the PHS moms looked on her phone, and she thinks that was the #1 Maryland girls HS time for 2014.

My PR was 10:45 I think. She's knocking on the door. That's a fantastic time, especially given her age.

Looking at DR's splits, his issue was definitely stamina as his mile splits consistently got slower.  On the bright side, DR is probably best at stamina when healthy.

My main motivation for registering for the St. Michaels Running Festival (which advertised “the fastest, flattest half marathon in the mid-Atlantic” ) was to follow up my LPRM performance with an attempt at procuring a profound new PR for a half marathon (my aspiration was to break 1:18:00 and score a solidly sub-6:00/mi pace). But then post-Hospice injury recovery robbed me of my necessary training time. And on the subject of injury, I was just finally coming around back to relatively normal running --- so why risk a severe setback by too soon attempting a grueling half marathon? The main motivation was naturally a hope for redemption after my humiliating walk of shame at Hospice. That was problematic, however, considering that the winning time in St. Michaels last year had been extraordinarily competitive. And again, I was in nowhere close to PR shape (mileage is of course crucial to HM training, yet my mileage over the 4 previous weeks had gone 0.6 miles, 0 miles, 13 miles, and 40 miles … a single, marginally decent 40-mile week just doesn’t cut it --- and my 14-mile treadmill run the week before the race had felt like a truly grueling long run!). Basically, setting a new PR would be nigh impossible, winning would be extremely unlikely, and risk of re-injuring my calf was arguably high. Ah, and those concerns didn’t even cover the austere efforts that would be required just to make it to the starting line!

I hit the road at 4 a.m. sharp that day, racing up and out Southern Maryland through dense darkness (it was actually rather chilly out, too). It wasn’t until I was nigh to Annapolis that a gray glimmer grew gradually gazeable to the east. I thought I might behold a sight so serene as the sun rising whilst I crossed the colossal Bay Bridge, but no; it wasn’t until a ways after I’d alighted upon the Maryland Eastern Shore that a burnt orange orb reared over the trees to my left (nearing Easton, the road was taking me straight south). Then getting to St. Michaels itself was slow going since race event traffic was backed up on the 2-lane rural highway (it reminded me much of Rt. 249) leading there off the main drag. Anyway, this latter part of my journey was sentimentally charged for me --- for though I attended college on the Eastern Shore, I’d not crossed the Bay in over 5 years. I was finally back:  to conquer, or to falter?

Despite the stakes against my victory being stacked seemingly so insurmountably high, I suddenly became rather confident over my chances just a couple minutes before the race began. It was shortly after the 10k field had cleared out (the starting order went 10k, half marathon, 5k, and I’d been under the misunderstanding that the half marathon would start at 7:30 a.m. sharp … the 10k didn’t even begin until 7:40 a.m.) that the announcer declared “Everyone who plans to finish under 75 minutes, come to the front.” No one moved (everyone was still hanging well back from the sensor pads). “How about 85 minutes?” cried David Phipps --- and at that moment I realized that he was about the most competitive looking other guy in sight. No one else I could see quite had that “look” of being particularly fast. Finally, the announcer was like “Well, somebody come forward” and thus me, Phipps, and a handful of others boldly stepped forth to toe the line. And after a dramatic countdown, we were off!

The Town:  I momentarily felt the rush of the stampede, but my destined dominance in the race was fairly clear before I’d even covered the short stretch of street from the school to the main road. I was already starting to run away with it! So, it took barely a mile to get through the town itself, but my goodness is St. Michaels quaint. Heralding my swift, eminent passage was the motorcycle cop, then a duo of bicycle marshals, and many folks were gathered along the streets to behold the spectacle. I felt like the star of the parade! Anyway, it seemed uncanny how casually I was able to maintain a sub-6:00/mi pace in the initial minutes of the race (a 5:44 opening mile with ease). Could that last the whole race?

The Golf Course:  After the downtown interlude, the course ran along the shoulder of the Rt. 249-like road for a ways before taking up a 3-mile side loop that would pass through woods and wind around a golf course. And it was when I made that right turn to take up the loop (at close to mile 2) that I looked back and got the sense that I couldn’t count out all my would-be rivals just yet. However, I had special guidance. The two bicycle marshals in front of me (and one in particular) remained in very frequent communication with me throughout the entire race. Much motivation from them, plus numerous assessments of my pace progress, and they would also look back for me to report on how comfortable my lead remained. Reports just kept getting better and better! Seriously, my lead had stretched to significantly over a minute by mile 4 --- where I was disappointed to realize that I wasn’t already at mile 5 (I’d been thinking “Just 8 more to go!” ). Though I was still maintaining a narrowly sub-6:00/mi pace while remaining relaxed, fatigue was fastly setting in. Meanwhile, though I knew we were fortunate to have relatively mild temperatures for it being May 17, shady stretches were highly coveted.

The Out:  Just before mile 5, we were back on the main St. Michaels rural highway, and it was 3 miles to the U-turn. More specifically, 3 very boring miles in which I was almost constantly running against a harsh headwind. And though I held onto sub-6:00/mi for 4 miles, upon mile 5 I had to let it go. Considering the distance remaining and my sad lack of stamina/endurance, it was of the utmost importance that I keep relaxed. Then, though I did cross the sensor pads they had set up at the “quarter-marathon” mark (or just over 6.6 miles as far as my Forerunner was concerned) sub-40:00, I had little hope that I’d manage to repeat that.

The Back:  Shortly before mile 8 was the longed for U-turn, yet it didn’t quite provide the instant tailwind factor I’d anticipated. But I did soon manage to gain a very clear view on my position in the race. David Phipps, solidly in second place, was a good ways back --- but not by so much that I could allow myself to become totally complacent. So I couldn’t give up on haste. Anyway, as I continued back the way I’d spent so much time running, one by one I passed all the more competitive runners face to face before the other side of the road soon turned into a nonstop, packed procession of hundreds. I passed 1,259 people (or at least close to that … there might’ve been a few stragglers still on the golf course loop when I passed by that junction again) head on! And the support was tremendous:  for 3 miles, it was virtually nonstop cheers and encouragement (including a couple utterances of “Go David” and “Yeah CBRC!” from the few Chesapeake Bay Running Club members there who happened to recognize me). All this acclaim could not possibly have been in more perfect contrast to the concern and confusion I received from runners in the Hospice 10k amidst my walk of shame. I couldn’t help but get emotional, and as mile 10 loomed I seized on the thrill of all that fame and endeavored to charge all the way to the finish!

The Town (Again) and Trail:  That crowd-fueled surge almost got me back under 6:00 for mile 10 --- but it also led to a rough mile 11. On the way back we bypass that golf course loop and just head straight back into downtown St. Michaels. I wasn’t looking quite as fresh as I had when first passing through town. Then, since the race did not conclude anywhere close to where it had started, instead of heading straight back to the school I was led through a few twisty side streets before being guided onto a bike trail. It was more reminiscent of the Indian Head Rail Trail than the Three Notch Trail, yet it had the unique feature of a covered bridge. Anyway, I daresay I was starting to feel as bad as I did during the last couple miles of the LPRM. There would be no epic fast finish for the final mile, as simply maintaining forward momentum was my only remaining function (in other words, I was fighting to keep the pace sub-6:30/mi). Mostly, however, I was finally letting go of the paranoia that my calf might pop on me again at any moment. Even if it had, I would not have been able to resist limping to end when so near to the finish. Now, though the bicycle marshals had been great to me all through the race, near the end they started contributing toward an impediment:  the last couple stragglers from the 10k race were also approaching the finish, and with the cyclists beside them my passage on the narrow trail was frustratingly clogged. So I just started clapping! That was the only thing I could think of to make them make way for the imminent victor.

Fortunately I did squeeze by them all just in time to manage a kick. And though I’ve crossed the finish line very casually in all my previous victories, this time there was simply too much to be grateful for (namely not reinjuring myself, not to mention defying seemingly insurmountable odds to win … all that made me not care so much about finishing almost 2 minutes over my PR … I gladly took that 1:21:17) that I simply couldn’t resist an overt gesture of triumph. Huzzah!

One thing that occurred to me, though, was that if just one faster guy had been there --- i.e., one person who could've snatched victory away from me --- then this would not have been such a rewarding experience. If winning was off the table, I could very well have phoned it in (using not wanting to re-injure myself as an excuse) and let David Phipps catch up to me. Good thing it was my lucky day!

 

 

 

David took the GM record with a 4:18x PR at States last weekend (4th place).

Awesome, that is impressive.  He came out of the gates as a freshman, went sideways his sophomore year to his disappointment (at least in the mile), but seems to have made decent progress the past two years.

I ran three races last weekend, and none of them are posted. But Suzanne said she'd mail me results from base tri.

After three consecutive years, the thrill of crushing Crofton is sadly diminished. My victory lacked the against-all-odds magnificence of the St. Michaels Half a few weeks ago, and to date no race experience has compared to the glory of Crofton 2012 (and I'm still yet to come anywhere close to rivaling the 10k PR I laid down that day). Then though Crofton last year did have the sentimentality of coming back from a fairly serious ankle injury (that which dashed my 2013 LPRM ambitions) and finishing on top, I was able to breeze my way to a repeat win due to a poorly competitive field --- and thus the fact that I had to hold off a pack of persisting pursuers (they were hard after me for the first mile or so, and then though I'd established a relatively solid lead by the mid-mark of the race, I felt one guy in particular haunting my steps all the way until around mile 5 ... he finished just 29 seconds after me!) this year provided me with a strong sense of relief at the finish line, however redundant winning that race is starting to feel.