The Full Story

Here are the finer details of my 4 mile race from yesterday!

I rode to the event with Lara and another runner named Lori and immediately realized that this was something completely different than all of the swimming races I had done in college. Some women biked 19 miles from the next town over and then ran this race! No I had my levels of psycho in college; Swimming lakes, doing 10,000 yards a day and holding pace for crazy intervals, but some of these people just blew me away.

I decided that I would try to keep pace with Lara, who wasn't entirely sure she would be able to run the whole thing...also she had a much cooler watch than I did; I had no watch. She said that if she needed to walk then her watch would be able to set walking/running intervals to keep to so we could at least keep moving as much as possible. Still I figured if we both ran together and kept each other motivated we would probably run the whole thing.

The race started and Lara and I stayed pretty close to a large group for about the first mile or so. I honestly was worried I wouldn't make it much more than about a mile because my body just felt really strange and I was breathing hard. I suspect it was probably due to running a bit faster than I usually do which was confirmed at the 2 mile mark when Lara told me that we had hit the 25 minute mark. I'm usually hitting high 25's and low 26's there and that's on a flat grade treadmill and we definitely had hills on our route.

At the water station near the second mile I managed to find new ways to take in water; through my nose! Needless to say this is something I'm going to have to work on because I'm definitely someone that dehydrates during a race and I just can't think that snorting water is going to benefit me in any way. I did however, pour some over my head and drench the bill of my hat in water as well. After the water station we ran a mostly flat, declined path up until about the 2.5 mile mark. Another great thing to see were people standing on the sides of the road cheering us on which was another motivating factor to keep on. Lara kept screaming at the cowbellers "More Cowbell" which seemed to help.

When we hit mile 3 I hit a wall like you wouldn't believe. It started up a hill and although it wasn't a steep hill it was enough to make my brain and my body start to conspire against my confidence in finishing this damn thing. For me it was definitely a gut check and I had two choices at that point. I could either try and keep pace with Lara and possibly wind up stopping and eventually walking or I could throttle back and finish the race. I finally told Lara that I was going to throttle back a bit and I would see her at the finish line. To be honest that last mile was one of the most mentally taxing moments of my life. I literally had to turn my brain off for about 15 minutes in order to finish it. I vaguely remember the last mile until I got to within about a quarter of a mile of the finish which was at the track of the middle school. Once I got on the track I started picking my legs up a little more, got as much of a sprint in as I could and finished strong!

Needless to say I'm very happy and feeling very accomplished. I don't really care whether I finished last or not, I know that I finished and that was what was important. I've lost nearly 30 pounds since April, I've run a 4 mile race and I've lived to tell the tale. I can only get better from here!