Monday, May 4, 2009

JUST RUN

That was my motto going into my 10 km race... I had been saying it to myself for 2 weeks and finally race day had come. Here's how it panned out.

Sunday morning rolls around, 4 am ish, was up every hour worrying I would miss both alarms etc… hit the road at 5 am , and just past sheg came upon an accident…. Yep… car overturned in ditch… girl trapped in car… thankfully I talked to the one kid whom I think got out of it, and another car pulled up and said they called ambulance, and it came 1 minute after I got there, so I go and ask one attendant if there is anything I can do, yes, do you have a blanket? Well yes, , so I ask if I am needed, and no, fire dept.. is en route so I drive on, yes, thru the broken glass as no one has swept it and I can see myself with a flat tire in Sudbury. ( girl was talking in car)

Nonetheless I make it and wait for my turn to run with the other 200 plus doing the 10 km race. … I am ready, the gun goes, I start off and um, how the heck am I supposed to find my groove, beat, pace, whatever with 400 other feet running beside me? Hello, I run in the quiet in half dark on Manitoulin, people? BE QUIET…. So 1 km into the run I feel a cramp…. What is that all about? I have never had that before… ok, keep going… oh, there is the 2 km mark, oh so they mark off each km…. Well that is a great idea, I like knowing where I am in the race… Now here is where it gets strange. Btwn the 4th and 5th km, I think I ran about 1500m, there is no way that was 1 km it felt way too long. Well, to be honest it was probably only in my mind … so by the 7th km, I wanted to take those little signs and shove them into the nearest garbage can! Why do I need to know where I am at all times? When I hit the finish I will know I am done. For goodness sakes, mark 5 and 10km, don’t put every one in between. Or skip one to make me think I am really cruising.

Now prior to the run, my friend had commented wondering when she was going to ‘hit the wall’… I said nothing as I had never experienced it, only heard about it…. Whatever, I am only running 10 k, and had done it twice before… so guess what at 7.5 km…. Something happened… wall, solid brick wall.. I don’t know how, but I wanted to stop, crawl into the fetal position and tap my ruby red slippers 3 times and I would wake up at home. OMG!!!! That was not fun… and guess what, that little 8 km sign was no where in sight. Ok, it did finally show up… I swear someone moved it further away. Now I am thinking ok, only 4 x 500m to go. Wait, another steep hill, for goodness sakes people, I am barely breathing here!

Now when I had read the description of the route it said easy, and only 3 rolling hills. My definition of a hill is my treadmill set at an incline of 0.1. That is an incline so that is a hill. I had already counted 3 of those hills and there were another 3 whopping big hills coming at me I was not prepared for. I think I am going to email the course organizer to tell him for the future the course description should read ‘ 3 hills and 3 mountainous regions on the route’.

To conclude, I do have my watch going to time myself and I usually do a km in 7.5 minutes… I did realize I was going faster than that. What else am I going to do between those stupid little km marker signs, than compute what speed I am travelling at?

At the 5km mark, I see I had done that in 31:31 minutes,, a personal best. So I was now really trying to clip along, clip for me, snail like pace for real runners… and I even picked up speed at the end.

There was no one there to cheer me in, but I didn't care one bit because I didn’t have to look at any more of those blasted km signs and because.... wait for it….. I have only ever done a 1 hour and 15 minutes time for a 10km run…. and wait for it ….. this time I did a ……… 1 hour 4 minutes and 16 seconds.
Yep, I took 10 minutes and 44 seconds off!

Yep… to reward myself I am not doing any exercises for 1 week! Mostly because I can't feel anything from the waist down.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

WOW! But you had fun right?
T