That is me, on the far left in the Beef shirt, smiling. Its a fuzzy picture which is good, because it camouflages the pain behind that smile. Not one certain place on my body in pain, pretty much the whole body. It was a ten-mile course, spattered with rock-n-roll bands all along the way. Sound cool on paper. It was cool. Except I only got to listen to each band for a few seconds...because I was RUNNING! Duh.
Many of Austin races have bands. I remembered that after we got started. Its kind of a thing here in the "Live Music Capital of the World". We're not bragging...much.
But the Austin 10/20 promised 20 bands during the ten miles and I thought what a cool way to distract me from the ten miles my body will be trying to run. I wondered as I watched those bands how many of them hated to get up that morning to go play in the muggy weather over thousands of sweaty runners trotting by not even able to stop and bang their heads. None of them looked much like "morning" people.
It was a mass start but we were organized into zones according to our running abilities so we milled through the corrals until we reached the start and off we went. I was running with two of my Beef team members who ran my same pace. One was soley a runner so she was probably conditioned to run faster but mentioned this was just a "fun run" for her, aka social-run-I'm-not-trying-to-win. The other is training for the freaking Ironman next month and said after this 10 miles her training plan says she needs to run another 10. Oh yeah, and she rode 74 miles on her bike the day before. She's a machine.
Me? I'm the triathlete who gets her workouts in while her kids are in piano or after dark when everyone's homework is done if I'm lucky. There are weeks I haven't been able to squeeze in more than one hour for a workout. Usually on the weekends I make up for it and try the whole Weekend Warrior thing with long rides or runs, but many times only one day of the weekend I'm able to fit something in. Its frustrating to want to do more but just not have enough hours in the day to do it.
Get up early you say? Hmmm, so I work until 5 every day. I drive home in rush hour traffic arriving by 5:40pm on a good day, and usually am out the door again to the kids' church, piano, volleyball or cheer functions by 6 or 6:30. Home by 7:30 or later depending on the night. Kids get dinner and shower and the dogs need a petting or even a walk if they're lucky and now its 9pm. Kids go to bed (in theory) at 9:30 and 10pm. Now if my teenager ACTUALLY goes to bed at 10pm, which usually bleeds over to 10:15 or 10:20, I get to finally veg in front of the TV to catch up on my shows. I try to turn off the TV by 11pm so I can read before I go to sleep. I love to read but never have a quiet moment except for 11pm or later. Fall asleep reading by 11:30pm.
Do you see me getting up at 5am the next morning? Uh, no. I do get up at 6:30am to start the whole thing over again, so to get an early morning workout in means 5am, and 5am means Mommy gets no sleep, and that means DANGER. I need my 7 hours of sleep or it gets ugly.
I digress. Our plan on the 10 miler was to run at least the first 5k without stopping and reassess whether to run/walk it. In the past on the two half-marathons, I ran/walked one and ran the whole second one and my time on the second was only like 8 minutes better. But somehow run/walking seems wussy. My running is slow enough that some duck-walkers pass me so really to slow down more is embarrassing.
We got to the 5K mark and the other girls were like "I feel good, wanna keep going?" so of course I said "YUP" even though my legs were not so happy at that point. After a 5K! UGH. I should be leaping past that 5K sign with all the running I've done in the past year. My last few weeks have been short sub-4 mile runs and not fast at all. Basically I've been slacking, and it showed.
We ran more and I think we got to the 5 mile marker and I finally said I wanted to walk a minute. It was right on the hour mark, so we try to time it as a four minute run, 1 minute walk so the math is easy on our watches. Sometimes we talk too much and don't pay attention and either walk too long or run too long...but 4/1 is easiest to maintain.
The sun never came out but the clouds were gray and low and holding the heat and humidity down right on us. I was smelly and sweaty and it was only half-way over. Austin is not a flat town and so up and down we went. I slowed at every water stop to hydrate and my legs, knees, hips continued to bark. The other two were slightly ahead of me which was fine because I was in a "leave me and my pain alone" mood and hung back on purpose. They would slow on the walks to let me catch up and we did have some nice girl-talk. I barely noticed the bands to tell you the truth.
We came back around the 9 mile marker and there was our Beef team volunteers cheering and making noise and taking pictures...hence the smiley pic above. It did give me a boost to get running and I saw the band we saw first as we left the starting gate. Whoo-hoo we are almost to the end and its only be an hour and 45 mintues! Oops wait, we still have a mile to go. We veer off from the finish line to loop around some of the stores in the Domain and I'm really starting to ache. But there were big crowds and our Beef team members were screaming for us to keep going so I put my head down and ran.
I always find a surge of energy to sling-shot me into the finish line of my races...all the spectators lined up yelling always helps me out. There we went all three of us across the Finish at 2:06. I didn't feel like I had a great run but my time wasn't horrible. I was #508 out of 628 women in my age group (40-44). That's a huge age group and I definitely wasn't a shining star in it, but there were 120 women of my age who sucked worse (not you K, your time was the same as mine, they just listed you a second slower so you were under me- totally not fair since you waited for me half the run!). There were 6,000+ men and women who finished and I was one of them, so I'll take it.
My training can be better. It will be better. I have an Olympic triathlon coming up in a month and I don't want my run to ruin it. I will squeeze an hour even if I'm tired, and even if the girls are busy, so I have something to call my own. I've already signed up for my next 10K (only 6.2 miles) and there's no excuse not to do better with 2 weeks to get ready.
And onward to the next over-sized stupidly heavy medal, which validates me whether I had a good run or not, and which I love so much.
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