Race weekend started with a concert on the Friday night.
I was off work on Friday so set off into the city around 4pm to pickup our race numbers from The North Face store on the upper west side. I then met up with Heather while we had some food and headed off to see Ben Harper & Charlie Musselwhite who is a blues musician and was on the harmonica during this tour.
I'd never been to the Beacon Theatre It was really nice, more like a concert hall, very ornate. I looked it up and although built in 1929 it was renovated in 2009. Although you couldn't quite gauge how old it really was as the decor has a little of that fake old look, a la Las Vegas.
The best bit being the Harlem Gospel Choir who joined them on stage or two or three songs:
So I got to bed around midnight and had to get up at 6.40am for an 8am to 4pm work shift on the Saturday. Although I come home tired it could have been so much worse given how busy recent Saturdays have been!
Race day morning involved a 4.30 am start. Right up until Friday we had planned to run it with friends.... who have a car. Unfortunately due to a death in the family they couldn't go and so we rented a zipcar late Friday for 24 hours and picked it up at 9pm on the Saturday night.
We left just after 5am and due to empty roads got to the car park around 6.15am. From here there were school shuttle buses taking you the 5 miles to the race start area.
It was a little cold up at the start area but you could tell it was going to heat up later so I decided not to bother with arm warmers or anything, plus there were supposed to be three aid stations on the course so I didn't carry any food or drink either.
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| A chilly start |
The race started at 7am and I was in wave 1 due to inputting somewhere around a 7min mile pace for a half. I had read someone's elses blog from last year warning that it narrowed to single track after a couple of miles and that it was difficult to pass, so maybe I went off a little harder than normal from the start. I looked up and could only see around twenty+ people up ahead so thoughts already turned to a top twenty or thirty position, ha ha.
It turned out that apart from a little section of downhill where you had to be careful running behind others as they obscured your vision of the trail it was wide enough to pass, plus I then started picking of other runners once it started heading uphill.
After about 4 or 5 miles the positions settled down and it was actually quite spaced out with me running a little harder to try and keep the guy in front of me in sight. The yellow ribbons (the half marathon colour) tied to the trees were a little difficult to see as they were obscured by the more dominant blue and orange ones but they did have plenty of them and 99% of the course was on a fairly well defined/trodden path with nice arrows if faced with a choice of direction.
I could kind of tell the guy up ahead was more of a road runner as he would pull away on the flatter sections and I would catch up on the uphills. It's good to have someone to track though!
The course was a mixture of mostly dry trails and a lot of rocky paths both uphill and downhill.
The dried out riverbeds full of different sized rocks that were the worst. There was one such downhill section after about 9 miles where I could feel my feet getting bruised and my feet sliding in the shoes, and I was delighted to get back onto the flatter trail to get back to 'normal' running.
The other bad part was a short steep downhill section on a slippy dry dirt path which reminded me about the Ythan Challenge riverbank where you purposely run into the trees to stop yourself falling.
My biceps hurt a little from holding my arms so stiff in order to balance myself coming down these hills. It's mentally tough as you know you can run a lot faster but the terrain limits you from doing this so you often feel yourself sprinting away when you get back to the normal wider paths.
I don't run with a GPS device and there were no mile markers on the course and due to the varying terrain I didn't have any idea of how far I'd run. I knew one aid station was around 8.9M so when I got there I asked and was told around 8.5M so that gave me an idea of where I was.
By this point I had been passed by two other runners on the downhill but there was the longest steepest uphill section just after the aid station and I started catching the guy I had been following all race and one other runner, both of whom were walking uphill.
This was the course profile:
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| El-eh-vation, woo woo |
I looked up some Scottish hill races to gain some perspective on what 2324ft of climb was. It turned out to be a bit more than Bennachie and about the same as Clachnaben, albeit over a 13.1M distance.
The actual race profile turned out to be a bit different than I was expecting, more rolling terrain with a few short sharp ascents and descents. There wasn't the same long constant uphill sections (or downhill) that you get back home and I was actually a little disappointed in the uphill, as that was where I was gaining time on others.
The trails, especially if the weather has been dry, are a lot more dry and dusty than Scotland but there was a good downhill slightly rocky section in the last 2.5M and the Half Marathon race merged with the accompanying 10K race so I really felt I was flying as I tore past the 10K runners!
The two previous months training paid off as I felt really strong here and with the help of two short uphill sections I was able to catch up the two guys that passed me a few miles back and I finished really strongly.
The finish area at Bear Mountain was super nice and the sun had indeed come out and it was nice to sit up on the hill overlooking the finish and wait for Heather to finish the 10K.
I wandered into one of the tents where you could find out your finish time etc. I finished in 1hour 51mins and was absolutely delighted to see that was for 6th position and 2nd in the 36-45 age group!
There were supposed to be over 800 runners but the finishers numbered 666 in the end.
What I eat after a race is funny, as I'd trained solidly for a couple of months for this, it's some kind of relief to go nuts and eat freely for the rest of the day.
I had a somewhat healthy Muscle Milk protein drink and a protein bar along with some water before starting on the Haribo sweets and fig bar biscuits. The couple of small cups of Pepsi they had in the runner tent went down well too.
Back at the car I had a Diet Dr Pepper from our cooler along with a coconut macaroon and then as we didn't have to have the car back until 9pm we made a stop somewhere in New Jersey for some Baskin Robbins ice cream for me and a Taco Bell drive thru for Heather.
On return to Brooklyn, Heather ran into Target for some groceries, you've gotta make the most of having a car here, while I ordered a pizza and cheesecake from an Italian restaurant I keep cycling past.
Around 7.30pm we went back out and drove south thirty blocks to the more Latino area near Sunset Park and using some kind of Cinco de Mayo excuse we tried a little Mexican place I'd read about and came home after dropping the car back with a couple of little taquitos.... followed by the other coconut macaroon and my fourth or fifth can of soda.
I also got a major reminder of my skin colour before we head to Hawaii in a few weeks.
Post-race, I was sitting down for a couple of hours.... under the sun. I did apply a little suncream to my arms and neck, put my cap on, and for a short time I put a small towel over my legs. However, the one part I didn't cover....
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| Ridiculous |
Not too sore in the couple of days afterwards. Just the usual shins and tired quads and calves. Will be doing less running this week, a couple of bike days to work and just generally trying to recover fully before tackling the Brooklyn Half Marathon on May 18th!
