OUCH!!! My pride is a little bruised, my hands and knees are
busted up, and my body is just a aching…
Yesterday really took its toll on me. How did it go wrong?
Let me count the ways… Here is the recap:
We left the baby shower at ten to four, I cried the entire
way home (please know that this is the first time that I have ever left my son
with anyone, not family, in his life. Also, I’ve only been away from him for 2
hours and I was going to be away from him for the better part of 6). We got
home with ten minutes to get changed, take one car to the babysitter’s house
(it had the stroller and play seat in the trunk, they needed them), and then
get our booties to the train station. I also had to throw one of my bras in the
dryer, and try to go the bathroom. We made it to the train station with our
bibs in hand and my shirt on inside out. 1 & 2
Once we met up with our group of friends at the train
station and headed downtown my nerves about leaving the baby had finally
started to calm down. It was race time, I needed to get my head in the game. HA!
We got downtown and started looking around the race venue and watching the other
races begin, the hand bikes looked really cool, and they even had rollerbladers
and unicyclists. Then we made one more “pit-stop” and started to make our way
to our corral in the starting area.
The organizers of the
event had made a horrible mistake of building a two way bridge over a walkway
for people to go over coming and going from the venue, so here we are with
hundreds upon hundreds of other runners trying to get to the starting line and
not making any progress due to the bottleneck at this bridge. 3 Then while we are trying to get to the start
on time (after ten minutes of fighting the crowds with only 5 minutes to go)
some ding dong woman in high heels starts trying to cut across the crowd. She
proceeds to trip on another runner and grab me by my shirt to catch her fall.
She pulls herself up by pulling my tank top down and looks at me with disbelief.
I yelled, “GO!” at her so that she would get out of my face because I was
infuriated that anyone that wasn’t running would be trying to get through the
crowd knowing that the race was about to start. 4 Then I felt like an absolute asshole for yelling at that
woman. 5
We make it to the starting corral just in time for the race
to start, and we’re off. Just as we pass under the start arch and over the chip
sensor I realize that I haven’t started my gps so I turn it on and wait for it
to pick up satellite. Waiting, waiting, waiting… It says something I’ve never
seen before and I ask Travis, “what do I do?” He tells me to restart it and try
again. I have to do this twice. 6
So on my second try, I don’t notice that we are starting to curve on the road
and my right foot catches a road reflector.
I EAT SHIT! 7
That’s right, I fall on my face, arms sprawled out, body contorted in a manner
unbecoming of a runner while the other 11,000 runners try to trample my ass.
Travis pulls me up from the ground, I’m crying. My hands are burning, my knee
is throbbing, my elbow is skinned, and my pride just took a nose dive into the
asphalt. He asks me if I’m injured, do we need to quit now, and reminds me not
to injure myself by pushing through this. Through tears I tell him that I am
fine and that we are going to run this effing race if it is the last thing I
do.
I continue to cry for the better part of a mile while Travis
continues to tell me to calm down. I gain control of my emotions for a little
while and try to just run. We trot for about two miles and I start to tell
Travis that he should run ahead, that he isn’t going to get a good time if he
stays with me and I don’t want him to be too sore from running my slow pace. He
does not leave my side. The miles slowly pass… We kept a 10:30 pace for the
first two miles but then I need to slow down to an 11 minute pace, my hip
flexors hurt, my back hurts, my knee hurts, and my hands are still burning. The
fall really took a toll on my body from tensing up, and my mind was just
running with whether or not Clark was doing okay. I tried to just keep thinking
that “Just keep running, then you’ll get to Clark that much faster.”
After mile 7 I need a walk break and this is where the race
went downhill, figuratively not literally. My hip flexors were not cooperating
at all! So at this point every time we would pass a beer tent I would think
about quitting, I would debate telling Travis to finish the race and then drive
back and pick me up under that wondrous reprieve, that I’d be tanked and need a
DD, but instead I just pushed forward. Miles 8 & 9 weren’t too awful, there
were children lining the streets giving high fives out to the runners that
acknowledged them. I tried to touch every single one that was held out to me,
those little kids were truly what got me through. I cried as I passed babies in
strollers, I cried as my ipod kicked out music that made me think of my Dad, I
cried at the thought of not being able to finish that damn race. 8
After 15 Kilometers I had to do the mental battle with my
body, I would just try to run a kilometer and then walk a little, I’d try to
make it to the next water station. There was a lot going on in my head and I
was not winning the battles, I walked A LOT! DEFLATED!!! 830pm my milk comes in BOOM! Holy Shit the pain! 9 I cry a little.
Finally we could see the finish line, it was about a mile
away and we had to snake through the city blocks to get back to it and I just
hoped that I could run the last part so that I didn’t look like a pansy to all
of our friends. That is when the Marathoners started to pass us. 10 That’s right,
the guys running the full marathon started to come in behind us and make their
way to the finish.
This is how I came to realize that the way to get your photo taken a lot was to
be really slow and get lapped by the marathoners…
We finally finished the race in 2:41:20, my worst race ever!
I keep trying to justify it with the fact that I had a baby less than 6 months
ago but that doesn’t help. I am trying to get over it. I know that I had a lot
on my plate, I have gone through a lot this year, there were a lot of factors
that lead to such a bad time but still, I feel like they are just excuses. I am
determined to get a better time THIS YEAR!!!
So my training will continue, I will start to try and slim down,
incorporate more speed work and drop any excuses that I come up with to not
run. Let the training BEGIN!!! Okay
continue but whatever…
Have you ever had a really bad race? What happened? How did
you get over it?
