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All-Livermore race weekend, part II

It's already Saturday and I still haven't finished reporting on last weekend's races. I am in our cozy living room watching rain pour down outside, and I am incredibly happy not to be out there. I can't believe that less than a week ago we were still enjoying late-summer weather.

Let's see, where was I? Last Saturday I did a cyclocross race in Livermore, and then on Sunday I drove back out to the exact same park in Livermore to run a half-marathon. There were at least half a dozen half-marathons in the Bay Area last weekend, but I chose the Grape Stomp because it was inexpensive, mostly flat, and smallish. And also because I liked the symmetry of racing two different sports in the same venue on the same weekend. I'm goofy.

My goal for the half was simple: finish under two hours. Not terribly aggressive, since my PR is 1:48, and since I ran the distance in 2:06 in a half-ironman in September. But I wanted to keep up my sub-two-hour streak. In my last two stand-alone half-marathons, and in five of the last six I've run, I've finished under two hours.

The race got underway and I missed the first mile marker. Doh. No worries, though, because at mile 2 I was right on pace. The first few miles of the course were on a pretty, autumn-leafy multi-use trail in Livermore. There were only a few hundred runners including the 10kers, and when we split off for the half-marathon there was plenty of room for everyone.

After three miles or so the course turned off onto what was basically a highway shoulder. The next two miles were an utterly boring, totally straight stretch of road through a bunch of gravel quarries. The point of this section was to get us to Shadow Cliffs, which is a lovely regional park with a lake and lots of trails. It's just too bad we had to run along the highway to get there.

Once inside the park we ran about a mile on some lovely trails. Unfortunately there was some sort of walkathon going on at the park, and the course markings were very similar to the race's markings, which was confusing. I spent several miles wondering if I had turned around at the wrong point and inadvertently added half a mile to my race.

Back on the highway, the mile markers started to get funky. And my knee suddenly started to hurt so badly I thought I might have to walk. The two women I had been pacing off of dropped me. With every passing mile marker I seemed to be falling more behind. I started limping a little. When I got closer to the pretty, leafy part of the course, I found a little motivation somewhere and picked up the pace. Shortly thereafter I got to the mile 10 marker and my watch read 1:30. I was still perfectly on pace for two hours. Mile markers 7, 8 and 9 were placed wrong. Way wrong.

The last three miles were tough. My knee had stopped hurting, but I was totally alone at that point and my legs were feeling the effects of the previous day's all-out sprint on top of the running they'd done. I felt like I had plenty of miles left in my legs, but not much speed. I crossed the finish line in 1:59:29.

Ideally, I would have had a nice restful day on Saturday -- racing my bike all-out for 30 minutes wasn't the best way to prep for a long running race. But I'm glad I did both; I think piling abuse on one's legs is a great way to make them tough if you don't overdo it.

Back to today, I can't remember the last time I spent a Saturday without doing any sort of workout. We did walk to breakfast this morning, a little over three miles round-trip, and that counts for something, but it definitely wasn't a Workout. Dave and I had been planning to race a duathlon today but decided against it when we saw the weather forecast. It's the off-season! Racing in crappy weather can be fun, but we just didn't feel up for it (or for the four hours of rainy driving it would entail). Tomorrow morning there's another cross race, and I'll decide when I wake up how badly I want to get muddy.

November 1, 2008 3:00 PM