Running Ruminations

In a perfect world, Represent Running’s 408k race in early February would be a rust-buster for me — my first race since CIM in early December — and an excellent way to begin training in earnest for May’s Mountains to Beach Marathon. 

In reality, February’s 8k came after being sick for about a week (much to my denial), and I spent the rest of February under the weather and visited the doctor’s office almost weekly (and dealt with a whackadoo doctor who partially diagnosed me as being “sensitive” because I’m a redhead — that’s a great story for a long run).

My winter and spring weekend schedule was seriously prohibitive, and ultimately, that meant that the one and only time I could race pre-MTB was at Represent Running’s Silicon Valley half marathon, situated at just about a month out from MTB. If you’ve been following my running for a while, you know that historically, I don’t race HMs well (and especially in the thick of marathon training), but since the SV half was the one and only race I could swing pre-MTB, Coach Lisa and I were determined to make it work. 

I ran the inaugural SV half and 5k last year (thanks to being on RR’s social media ambassador team), and since my experience was so positive, I expected the same this time around. The biggest difference between last year’s and this year’s race was that the 5k was going to be held on Sunday, just a few hours after the half concluded, instead of the day before. Even though I’d be running in both the half and the 5k, I planned to focus my efforts on the half and just treat the 5k as part of a longer cool-down. 

True to form for RR races, all morning long, from the time I spent warming-up to the time I spent cooling-down, I ran into tons of people I knew, making an already fun environment even more so; I’m telling ya, these things are as much social as they are athletic endeavors. Meredith had come down south to also run in the half marathon (yea!), and we were all excited for a great race to unfold before us, with our respective race plans in hand. We planned to share warm-up mileage and cool-down mileage together, and after not seeing each other for a while, it was just lovely to catch-up.  

From what I can recall about the 2018 SVHM, the 2019 race followed roughly or exactly the same race course, and we got supremely lucky with the weather (again), since late April can be a bit of a crapshoot between rain or heat. Fewer Wolfpack teammates were racing or volunteering this year than usual (no doubt due to a PA race occurring over in nearby Saratoga), but much to my surprise, by about mile 2, I saw Meg and mini-KEG, Kim, Elise, and Connie on the sidelines, cheering their hearts out. Talk about a huge pick-me-up! That girl gang kept moving throughout the course, too, making it seem like they were appearing out of nowhere, just adding to the already uber-positive vibes that morning.

Typically speaking, if I can squeak out a sub-1:40 half during marathon training (essentially running at GMP), I’m satisfied, simply because I tend to not race the distance very well, mostly due to either improper pacing, GI blowouts, or a combination of the two. Coach Lisa gave me pace ranges for various parts of the course (roughly divided into 5k or 10k blocks), but more than anything, she stressed going off perceived effort and not clock feedback. Though I was hitting the early pace targets, the effort felt much higher than it should have been, so pretty early on in the race, I dialed back from a HM effort (or a big negative split) and settled more in a GMP-tempoish-SS range. 

In the throes of the race, I distinctly remember feeling like I was running strong but not necessarily fast, which is kinda… weird. I recalled having the same feelings at SFM ‘18 and CIM ‘18, like I had the aerobic capability to keep chugging along and not necessarily tank my pace, but I didn’t have much to give when it came to actually digging a little more deeply; where I was, on the day, was going to be where I was going to be. I have theories as to why this has happened relatively often in my racing, but during the SVHM, I tried very hard to not fixate on my perceived lack of speed and instead just tried to keep the turnover coming and slowly pick off all the racers ahead of me. 

For what it’s worth, running strong and running fast aren’t mutually exclusive, but I think feeling one — at the other’s expense — ultimately comes down to any number of variables, from the obvious (training) to perhaps the less-so (what did pre-race recovery look like? How well did I sleep that week? How mentally in it was I in the thick of the race?). Mid-race, even when the paces temporarily climb, or the effort temporarily becomes more laborious than we’d like, I think we all come to a crossroads with the dilemma at hand: freak out and lose our shit — and maybe make a not-ideal situation far, far worse — or tell our amygdala to relax through the rough patch — and stick with it and expect it to get more palatable again. 

This makes me think of something I read from pro runner Stephanie Bruce along the lines of in racing, we can control exactly two things, our effort and our attitude. (And IMHO, that’s some pretty powerful stuff when it comes from someone whose livelihood literally depends on how fast she can run a given distance on a given day). At the SVHM, when the running got hard, I tried to keep grinding and keep focusing on the positives and that which I could control. It was (literally) the only thing I could do. 

For most of the race, I stayed near GMP, plus or minus a few seconds, and actually felt really good in the process, and over the final 5k, I tried to dig a little more deeply and finish a little faster; I was (stubbornly) not convinced that my output was the end-all, be-all best that I could give that morning in those miles. Serendipitously, I ran into one of my teammates (who wasn’t in Wolfpack gear), and chatting with him for a few strides along the back 5k was a great little pick-me-up. Ultimately, the day went over pretty well as a solid LR workout about a month out from MTB, and I finished with an (exhausted) smile on my face.  

While I (of course) would have liked to run faster or feel fresher going into the race (if memory serves, my allergies had also kicked into high-gear earlier that week), a 1:37 and change and ultimately, 19+ miles for the day was satisfying. I mean, I have nothing to complain about. I didn’t perfectly execute the plan that Coach Lisa had laid out before me, but when she said these paces shouldn’t feel hard, and if they do, dial it back, I quickly went into Plan B mode and turned the distance into an attempt to race strictly by effort. Not self-sabotaging when the race began to veer south early in and of itself is a victory to me because it is so, so easy to catastrophize when racing. 

The SVHM helped stoke my excitement for running Mountains to Beach in late May, and I was also grateful to be in a racing environment for the first time all training cycle. Like I mentioned before, my winter and spring schedule was extremely prohibitive (in the best way possible, fortunately), so my running and racing exploits have taken a bit more of a backseat than usual, and the SVHM was the only race I could fit in this spring. I’m glad I did it, as (per yoosh, for RR races), it was well-organized, featured lovely amenities, and offered a fast and competitive field, and this time around, even Meb was there, pacing the 1:30 pace group (or the 40 minute 10k group)! It’s yet another local race — much like the 408k — that I wouldn’t mind doing year after year simply because of its vibe and amenities.