That's 10% of the way to my goal, in under one year! At this rate, I may finish 50 races in 50 states well before I'm 50. But I don't want to jinx anything, of course.
It was a little chilly down by the water, and I was kind of regretting the sleeveless top. But, I'd gotten pretty toasty during my warm-up loop around the neighborhood back in RI around 7:30 a.m., and I didn't want to overheat. And I was right, once I was running, I was not missing the sleeves. It was even warmer just a few steps away from the water, at the starting line.
It was a gorgeous day in New London today. Check out that sky behind me!
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| Just after checking in. |
And the race was overall a really nice event. The organizers were great, even when my name wasn't on their pre-registration list. I had pre-registered, but they were having some snags with the whole PayPal thing, and they just took me at my word, had me fill out a new form, and handed me a number and a shirt, no other questions asked. Special shout-out thanks to Jessica, who was really friendly about the whole thing and also chatted with me a bit at the end and expressed enthusiasm about my 50 Races in 50 States project. I don't know whether I'll be able to find time to do this race again in future years, but I would definitely consider it, thanks to the very nice people I met there.
Also, some random other runner very kindly picked up my hat for me when it blew off just about 100 m shy of the finish line. You can't really see the hat in either photo, but it's from my high school ice hockey team, so I would have been really sad to have lost it altogether. The hat decision was mixed in its success: on the one hand, it was a very bright day, and I was glad to have extra help keeping the sun out of my eyes. On the other, it was also pretty breezy, and I kept having to adjust the angle of the brim to keep it from blowing off (any sooner).
Back to the beginning of the race:
It was a little chilly down by the water, and I was kind of regretting the sleeveless top. But, I'd gotten pretty toasty during my warm-up loop around the neighborhood back in RI around 7:30 a.m., and I didn't want to overheat. And I was right, once I was running, I was not missing the sleeves. It was even warmer just a few steps away from the water, at the starting line.
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| At the starting line. I did warn y'all this would all be self-photography, right? |
So, the results: I finished in 28:44 (officially, although my RunKeeper app said 28:36). Official pace was a very respectable 9:16, overall place was 52nd out of 178, division place 8th out of 25 (F 30-39). I'd have to say I'm really quite happy with that!
Which is good, because I'd committed the cardinal sin of going into this race with Expectations. And Expectations are exactly the sort of thing I wasn't going to have when I started this whole racing hobby. When I ran my first race last June, my goal was to finish. Ideally, finish having run the whole thing, and not finishing last would be a great bonus. And then I did really well, relatively speaking, and suddenly I started to get Ideas. Put that together with a pretty slow run in Portsmouth and some better training times in the past couple of weeks, and my Ideas started to turn into the aforementioned Expectations that I would somehow be Fast this time.
And then the horn went off, and all the people who always pass me at the start started passing me, and suddenly there were small children running ahead of me. I mean really small children. And also people who were older than I am, look less "fit" than I think I do (whatever that means), and generally all sorts of folks that my middle-school-arrested ego somehow thought "shouldn't" be able to run faster than I can.
Can we just examine that thought for a moment? A year ago in March, I ran more than half a mile successfully for the first time in my life. Until that point, the list of people who "should" be able to run faster than I can included, oh, pretty much everyone on the planet who'd ever run and probably a bunch who hadn't.
Fortunately, since I don't run races with earphones or a playlist, I had upwards of 28 minutes to think about things, and all of this occurred to me. It occurred to me pretty early, even. In fact, I came up with the title of this post sometime in the bottom half of mile one. Simply put, my ego has no place in a race. My enthusiasm? Sure. My ambition? Hey, why not. But an ego that's based in running faster than other people? That's just going to leave me feeling frustrated at best, and at worst could cause me to push myself hard enough to hurt something. I won't do this that way. I'm going to keep it fun.
The only ego trip I'm going to allow myself from now on? Working on this goal. It's fun, it makes me feel good about myself, and it leaves me room to do all this at my own pace (literally and figuratively) without putting myself at risk for injury. And if I happen to learn, somewhere along the way, that someone else is working toward the same goal (or has perhaps already run a certified marathon in every state plus D.C.), then the more, the merrier.
And with that bit of navel-gazing, I'm going to give my New Balances a rest for a few days. My next race is in San Francisco in late July, and I'm only about 4 miles from completing the pre-race portion of the Progressive Marathon. I think I can afford a week off.
You know. Unless I just happen to feel like going out for a run.
Which is good, because I'd committed the cardinal sin of going into this race with Expectations. And Expectations are exactly the sort of thing I wasn't going to have when I started this whole racing hobby. When I ran my first race last June, my goal was to finish. Ideally, finish having run the whole thing, and not finishing last would be a great bonus. And then I did really well, relatively speaking, and suddenly I started to get Ideas. Put that together with a pretty slow run in Portsmouth and some better training times in the past couple of weeks, and my Ideas started to turn into the aforementioned Expectations that I would somehow be Fast this time.
And then the horn went off, and all the people who always pass me at the start started passing me, and suddenly there were small children running ahead of me. I mean really small children. And also people who were older than I am, look less "fit" than I think I do (whatever that means), and generally all sorts of folks that my middle-school-arrested ego somehow thought "shouldn't" be able to run faster than I can.
Can we just examine that thought for a moment? A year ago in March, I ran more than half a mile successfully for the first time in my life. Until that point, the list of people who "should" be able to run faster than I can included, oh, pretty much everyone on the planet who'd ever run and probably a bunch who hadn't.
Fortunately, since I don't run races with earphones or a playlist, I had upwards of 28 minutes to think about things, and all of this occurred to me. It occurred to me pretty early, even. In fact, I came up with the title of this post sometime in the bottom half of mile one. Simply put, my ego has no place in a race. My enthusiasm? Sure. My ambition? Hey, why not. But an ego that's based in running faster than other people? That's just going to leave me feeling frustrated at best, and at worst could cause me to push myself hard enough to hurt something. I won't do this that way. I'm going to keep it fun.
The only ego trip I'm going to allow myself from now on? Working on this goal. It's fun, it makes me feel good about myself, and it leaves me room to do all this at my own pace (literally and figuratively) without putting myself at risk for injury. And if I happen to learn, somewhere along the way, that someone else is working toward the same goal (or has perhaps already run a certified marathon in every state plus D.C.), then the more, the merrier.
And with that bit of navel-gazing, I'm going to give my New Balances a rest for a few days. My next race is in San Francisco in late July, and I'm only about 4 miles from completing the pre-race portion of the Progressive Marathon. I think I can afford a week off.
You know. Unless I just happen to feel like going out for a run.
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