LR half marathon

Some people are fair weather fans. Some are fair weather friends. I'm a fair weather racer. Sunday was completely devoid of fair weather.

Saturday was Emily's first 5K!

I was having confidence problems going into the weekend, despite my best efforts. Although I don't put much weight on rankings and such, I'd just found out I was USAT All American for 2013. This sounded suspicious to me given my less than stellar results this past year and since I only everrank that high in my IMFL years. So when I realized they had altogether eliminated the category of Honorable Mention, my usual end of year status, and just called all of us All American this year, I wasn't surprised. But I tried to let it boost my confidence anyway. Then there was something about getting ranked as a silver medalist for Ironman? Seems at least one of my blah 70.3s this year was good enough to get me there, whatever that means. As sad as it sounds I reminded myself of these things, and that I can run this half marathon course well enough to win $500 (when nobody shows up). And even get into the elite corral ("you're elite?"). And surely even if we had terrible weather, I thought I was in better shape than I was for my half marathon in October. And the course Sunday was a good bit flatter. 

Hey both feet are off the ground! Must be very early on. 

I told Damie the day before that if I didn't have a good race, I'd blame the weather, and it's true! It was the weather's fault! And those crazy people who convince me to wear less clothing than I really need. I kept thinking of the year I wore a long sleeved shirt under my Los Locos tank and took it off from underneath the tank while running. I didn't want something like that to happen again, and it was going to be over 50 degrees at the start, so I wore shorts and short sleeves. I had been stalking a local weatherman all week and he told me that the front would come in much faster than  predicted. But I didn't listen. Instead of dropping 4 degrees in 90 minutes, it was more like a 15 degree drop. It rained on and off, it was windy with nobody to draft off of, and I froze up in mile 6. 

It was all going fine, or at least ok, until then, except for having no traction on even the slightest uphills due to the slick roads. After mile marker 5, a guy I had chatted with at the start came up beside me and talked again. It took my mind off things for a bit, but I found myself out of breath afterward and feeling significantly worse. The mile splits took a turn in the wrong direction, and I wish I had too, but my main concern was the sharp pain in my right hip/SI joint (the usual) and the cold numbness creeping up my arms and legs, as well as my blurring vision. Does this not happen to anyone else? Jeremy acted like I was nuts when I told him how my vitreous humor must be freezing up when it's cold because I can't see after a while. Can Raynauds affect your eyeballs?

Surprisingly to me, I kept passing women and a few men along the way. I'd been assigned to corral B but snuck into A before the start, not that anybody cared. I was slowing down dramatically but still keeping the same distance on one small woman ahead of me until mile 11. When I passed her as we turned into a headwind, she tucked in behind me and stayed there for a bit. It was all fine until she started kicking my heels! She said something that I didn't understand but kind of didn't sound like apologizing. But my ears were pretty frozen too. She then dropped back and I never saw her again. I was passed by a speedy woman at mile 12, and tried to keep her in sight, but once she was 10 yards ahead of me I couldn't get a clear view of her anymore and that was that.

 ug

The last mile-point-one took freaking forever, and I can now assume that is because it was a 13.35 mile race according to my Garmin and everybody else's that I looked up online. Why can't races come up a little short anymore? I'll pretend it was the full distance if you will. I somehow hit my lap button on the Garmin around 13.11 without having any feeling in my fingers, so I'll go with that time instead of another 1:35! I'm cursed by the 1:35s still, but I suppose it could easily be worse. I crossed the finish line and was told to keep moving by a warm dry man who had not been running, and his light hand on my back just might've caused me to fall forward if I hadn't mumbled something about needing a second to stand ("BACK OFF DUDE!" no, i didn't say that). I went to get my large medal and heard my name being called by a mylar blanket wrapped person standing just a couple yards in front of me. It happened to be my sister, who had been calling my name right in front of me over and over before I could see or hear her. She had been getting frostbite waiting for me after her 10k, with her new friends I thought she was going to introduce me to.

This is one in a series of 4 (4!) photos where I'm looking at my watch. It's such an unbelievably bad time. Or I can't believe it was that long. Or it just took a while for my eyeballs to work. 

The real win of the day was the awesome parking spot we got about a block from the finish line, so after we loaded up on junk food and made a quick warm up stop in the coffee shop in between, we got to the car and sat in the blasting heat for about 10 minutes before I felt stable enough to drive. The numbness masked the awful pain in my, well, everything (whose lats hurt after half marathons?), which keeps reminding me of what a bad decision it was to run. I was actually wishing they had just canceled the whole thing. I almost thought I'd gotten away with another pitiful race going unnoticed, since I was mysteriously missing from the results, just like that Phoenix marathon that I may or may not have run. Turns out they had me listed as a 10K finisher with a spectacular 15:20 per mile pace. It has since been corrected, assuming 13.1 miles, which it was not! So marks the end of my half marathon season. It's on to trail races now.

It's not actually a mug shot.