I’ve had a few days to reflect on the race now, and am still very satisfied with the result. I’m not sure I would have changed anything, even if I could have. Below is my account of the race and the few minutes following the race.
The race started at 7:00am on Sunday morning. This was probably my only complaint about the entire race experience. We were up at 4:00am. I sleepily made my instant cream of wheat and forced it into me. I can remember thinking how happy I was that this was the last bowl of cream of wheat I was going to need to eat for at least a month (I found it, as opposed to oatmeal or toast or cereal was the most ‘stable’ in my gut while running. I had eaten it pretty religiously for breakfast before training 4 or 5 days a week. Problem is, it’s probably the most boring, bland food in the world). But at the same time I was excited that finally the culmination of all the training was here.
The course was point to point, and our hotel was near to the finish, so this meant for some logistical issues before the race. We (the 5 of us from
Vancouver that travelled down together) rented a car for the weekend and decided we would drive to near to the start, instead of having to sit on a school bus for 45minutes with swarms of nervous runners. The drive went by pretty quick as we were entertained by a really random mix of tunes of the radio. Trevor was actually staying in a hotel about 2.5miles from the start, so we got to his place around 5:30am, hung out there for a while then drove about a mile to a spot where we’d get a shuttle to the start. We got on the shuttle at about 6:20. But, it took some crazy roundabout route to the start area, instead of the 1.5 miles straight up the road. I started to get nervous and anxious at about 6:30 when the bus still hadn’t stopped to let us out. Even though I didn’t plan to do a lot of running to warm up I had planned to start it by at least 6:30. So, when we eventually got off the by at about 6:35 I was a bundle of nerves and started running immediately to ‘warm-up’.
Even though I didn’t go through the drills and stretches I had planned to I got about 7minutes of running in and had plenty of time to get my Mizuno Wave Ronin racing flats on and to the start line. I must have missed the handle cyclist start (which was happening 1min before the rest of the race) because when they starters started a countdown “ten, nine, eight……” I thought it was for the hand cyclist. So when they said “Go” and the horn went off and everyone else took off running I was caught off guard. Luckily I had 26.2 miles to catch up! I did a little shimmying and shaking in the first few hundred metres to try and make my way up to the guys I thought would make up the lead group. Problem was they were absolutely jogging and I was chopping my stride to stay behind them. I got frustrated with that after about 10 seconds (yeah I know I am really patient!) and decided to run off to the right side of the road and just find a rhythm. My rhythm quickly had me running ahead of the pack that was slowly forming. I told myself be patient, but just run a decent pace, don’t wait for the rest of them. This wasn’t my original strategy for the race, I was planning to just sit in, hand on, and make a strong move at 22miles, if I was still in the race at that point.
But, I also knew I was very fit, and that there was the possibility the lead group would go pretty slowly to start. So, we had also discussed that if I was running within myself, running alone wasn’t necessarily a bad plan. There was actually one guy up ahead who had set out a decent pace, so I just focused on catching up to him in the first mile, I caught him about 100 metres before the 1mile marker and he didn’t attempt to run with me, I was hoping he would have. But, when they called out 5:06 for the first mile, I just said ‘oh well this is not too fast I am just going to go and run my own race’.
I pulled away from the pack pretty quickly. I wasn’t really all that concerned in the early miles. I was a bit surprised that no one went with me. But, I wasn’t really trying to make a break away in the sense that I was trying to get as far ahead as possible in as short a time as possible so that they wouldn’t catch me. I wanted people to catch me and run with me (at least at that point I did). I wasn’t running a crazy fast pace, they were just running slowly.
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