Cooler weather is coming!
But we're still signing up for races like it's summer:
"I want you to pray as if everything depends on it, but I want you to prepare yourself as if everything depends on you."
-- Dick LeBeau
Han,
your a star! A guy in his blog wrote about you in the race that you ran this weekend! I googled "Han Zhang Orthocarolina" and it showed up under the initial result on google. You couldn't pull out the win for the group? You pulled ahead of this guy with 1/2 mi to go and you almost broke him, but then he reeled you back in (although you had a better chip time so you still get our vote).
Also, didn't Ping (Pete) Hu, your friend also run (fr the group)? Maybe you can goad him to post here?
What was the team you were representing?
Rob
Wow, he is the Allen from the Allen's road to Boston, one of my favorite blog I followed all the time. If fact, I read his blog the night before the race to get a feeling about the race, he did the race twice and wrote a good article on it, if I knew it was him, I may go to get his autograph. lol, He passed me about 10 meters away from the finish line and I have no enough time response to that move. But anyway I likes his bolg, and I showed my wife the section like "a fit looking Asian man" and "He looked pretty young, I was guessing low-30′s".
Yes, Ping (Pete.Hu) is my friend, he is also my co-worker, he may read here but he does not talk much like me. He is a sub-3 marathoner and I think I mentioned him here. The team we are in is "Flying Foxes", I formed the team from 1 years ago to run the Blue Ridge Relay in 2 weeks, I picked the OrthoCarolina 10K as the last tune-up race, my team may be the first all Chinese team to run the BRR208, . Half of my team didn't run at all 1 year ago, and we are average 7:51.5 pace in the weekend race. I am really proud of them. ( of 12 of us, 7 male, 5 female, 8 of us are 40+ and only one is younger than 35.)
Scheduled Races:
Tokyo Marathon (March 2020)
Boston Marathon (April 2020)
if you only taken care of those "speckles of grey in your hair" the night before the race, he would have let you go thinking you were that "fit looking Asian man in his low 30's" and would not have panicked and kicked at the end! My first impression of you at that "Run of the Cake" 1/2 marathon that Sunday morning was "who is this fit Asian man who keeps looking at his watch as that is going to drive me crazy", although my second impression was when you scared the heck of me at the 9 mile mark by coming up behind me -- after you had literally taken off at the 1/2 way point (and after you told me what happened, that you galloped to the porto-potty 3/4 mile away, I really could not stop laughing!).
Best of luck at BRR. Amazing that you were able to recruit 6 non-runners to do serious training for BRR -- do they know what they are getting themselves into? Who is running the mountain goat section or whatever the section where you run 10 miles up the mountain?
Han, we are running BRR too, Which Van would you be in?
Hi Shashi, I am running leg #8, #30 and #32, so I am van #2. What is your team's name? I may find you at a transition zone.
Most likely they don;t know, I don't know either, since no one in the team ran any type of relay before. But I made sure all of us ran at least one half marathon from last year, so I hope they are well prepared, but I told them I don;t care about the time.
I think you mean the leg 14 (10 miles with Very Hard rating), Ping will run that.
Han, Our team is the Sad Panda. I'll look out for you at the transition zones. Our team has a super early start at 6:30 AM (even though we projected a 9 min/mile pace), and may leave all 3 transition zones before you arrive.
Currently planning on Running 3, 15, and 27, the easy one as others are faster than me. I had always run at 1 or 7 (i.e. leading off) in 6 relays so far (3 of them BRR, one a 6 person Ultra), so will run anything else, but in all likelihood in van 1 as I am the only one who has experience running a relay in that Van.
BRR can be a shock if you are not used to running in the mountains. When they say a hill they mean it, especially the first 6 legs and the last 8 and a couple in the middle. A medium rated is a hard run at most other places and is a medium only by comparison to the Hard and Very Hard segments.
Clive, I'm out for awhile as I have the kids during the week also. I hope Rob made it. I doubt I'll make it next week either.
I see how it's going to be.
Lynwood,
yes I did make it and we ran together. Clive got to meet Jeremy and learn Jeremy's training methods (which I think he is integrating into his training). It felt oppressive out there and it was -- the dew point was a a very oppressive 73 (I have not run at that high of a dew point this year so know I now why my shorts were soaked at 5 miles and at 6 miles my shoes were completely soaked and squishing). Clive said he has not sweated this much since before his vasectomy surgery (now I remember he told me to keep that private so I struck it out so nobody can see that -- using commercially reasonable standards of course). It was good to finally meet Clive in person -- although there was one strange incident -- we got the water fountain at the 5.2 mile mark and as hit went to take a drink of water Clive instinctively bent down to drink fr the silver dog bowl next to the fountain?
Shashi, I successfully scared my team by forwarding this to them...
Well, that race was fun. Did I get any hardware? Check it out: