Bluffton Race Thoughts, Part 1

And we’re off. Heading out of the Promenade, the first thing I notice is an official of the race, who’s guiding us on his bike. Kinda made it feel like I was still asleep and somehow wandered into the wrong section of an Ironman, but he was keeping us all on path. For good, solid reasons, I learned later.

As we ran out, I passed the first intersection and went past two of Bluffton’s finest, flashing lights on top of the car, waving us through to the first open section of the route. To my left, I heard a bunch of women, chatting happily and excitedly (clearly THEY had some coffee…) about the race, their friends who were in the race, the people meeting them at the finish, etc… It continued for about 200 yards, and then they started to fall back. And get less chatty. And less. And… quiet. A pair of co-runners chuckled and said, ”Well, I knew THAT wasn’t going to last long”…

My first view into pacing had come and gone. I didn’t have anyone to converse with, an outlet for my pent up energy. It was energy I had to do something with, but also had to conserve. Having been warned over and over not to start fast, I was trying to keep my starting gun jitters to a minimum and stay steady. It sorta worked. As I got away from the Chatty Cathys, the pack started to break up. This race had a 5K attached to it as well, and as we approached that level’s turnaround mark I felt pretty good. The Garmin told me my pace was about an 8:45 mile. If I kept this up, or at least near, then a sub-120 minute finish was possible.

It was a great theory.

What I hadn’t anticipated was the wriggly route. Chris and I drove it the night before, but that’s a whole lot different than running it. It was 13.1 miles, and it was near the ocean. So, the course was one big ball of yarn. Imagine getting two miles away from a mall, running to it, and then running eight miles in around the crevices of the mall, lastly running back out to your finish. Felt like I was in a game of pin-the-tail-on-the-runner.

The roads had spray painted markers on them as to where we were to turn, repeat, double back, etc… It got really tough to figure out where I was. The signs that had mile markers on them were at repeat points, causing my sweaty brow to furrow more than once. When I was hitting mile three, there was a marker right after it that said mile ten. Did I black out? Was I that much in the zone?

Ah, no. I was doubling back.

What made it more distracting (and I am easy to distract), was the eventual winner of the race was FLYING past me in the other direction. Again, my rookie status was showing. We were 25 minutes into this. Don’t tell me that kid is already finishing! He wasn’t, but he’d doubled back, and was going into some other serpentine section of the course. Really fast, I might add. Really really fast.

What made this difficult was that my pacing markers (in my head, anyway) were thrown way off. I was used to running a course where I knew where the miles were. So, I could check my pace as I hit the places I knew marked the distance. This had to change. Those pacing places needed to be ignored and had to put them inside my head on an internal track. That way, I could time out the pace, as opposed to looking at a target and hitting it at a certain interval. Otherwise, I’d be looking at the same trees over and over, wondering what wrong turn had been taken as I stood knee-deep in surf.

As I hit mile five, I decided that the jitters were over and I had to start divvying up my effort. So, I figured I’d break this race into a three legged stool – Leg 1) miles 1-5; Leg 2) miles 6-10; and Leg 3) miles 11-13.1. 

For the first leg it was: Get through it. Warm up and ignore what felt like blow darts being shot into my ankles and hamstrings as my sleepy body woke up and warmed up. For the first 30 minutes, it was one mystery pain after another. Tweak, knot, pull, twist, pinch, blister. Ugh. It was like a game of Pain Whack-a-mole. As soon as one backed off, another popped up. By mile six, though, they were all quieted, back into their holes, and grumbling about the score. 

Chris - 1, Pain – 0.