Race you to the Beach

The 2012 Run for the Oaks 5k is in the books.  It was a pretty fun course with lots of rolling hills but nothing really steep, and I pulled a decent time at 22:52.  It wasn't the 21:50 I was hoping for, but I still feel good about the effort I put in.

I ended up starting a little farther back in the corral than I usually do, but it was an uphill start so I wanted to be conservative.  Played it safe up that first slope, then it went into rolling hills for a while. Up and down, up and down.  I cleared the first mile in 6:52, perfect pace for a good finish time but maybe a bit too fast to be able to negative split.

This course was kind of a loop and kind of an out and back.  It's all in downtown Raleigh, so we're running on the grid.  Basically it went down one road, over a block, and back up a parallel road before a zigzag stretch to hit the required mileage, and finishing down the same hill that we started up.  So you kind of got more elevation gain before the turnaround block, then running more downhills coming back home.  The downside to that is that by the time you get to the turnaround point you are completely exhausted unless you played the first half of the race very carefully.

I did not play the first half of the race very carefully.  Mile 2 was closer to 7:2x, I don't have the exact split from the garmin yet.  But that's where I ran out of gas, again.  The rolling hills coming back definitely felt easier than the (same) rolling hills going out, but I did take them much slower.

The last mile had us zagging across a few blocks.  I made the last turn and could see the finish line, when I checked the garmin for the last time.  I swear it looked like it said 21:2x overall time, so I thought I could apply a hard kick to the finish line and still make my 21:50 goal.  I gave it everything I had left.  Abs were crunching hard, legs and arms were flying, there was actually drool falling out of my mouth as I was gasping for life.  I'm sure it looked ridiculous.  But I thought I was going to hit a goal time.  I passed maybe 15 people charging to the finish.  The garmin recorded my fastest pace at 5:05, and I think it was in that finishing kick.  I must have read the wrong overall time in that last glance, because the finish sprint only lasted maybe 30 seconds and my final time on the garmin was 22:51.  So maybe I dyslexiced the digits and it really said 22:1x.  But I finished really strong.

And since I know you were pulling for me, I thought I was going to puke at the end of mile 2 but didn't, and I thought I was going to puke at the finish line as well but held off again.  I did pull off my own timing chip, and tried to hand it to a baby that was propped up in front of the bucket where volunteers were handling the chip return.  The baby just looked at me funny, the mom laughed and took my chip, and I found a nice stretch of sidewalk to collapse on.

Official:  22:52 chip time, 23:01 gun time, 7:25/mile pace, 145/513 overall, 10/30 male 35-39

After gathering myself a bit, I made it back to cheer Kelley in.  She finished in 31:43 and said it was the best she's felt after a race in a long time.  She was pretty worried about a hip thing that bothered her some after our last marathon, so I was quite relieved that she gained confidence with this race.  She did really well!

Official: 31:43, 10:18 pace, 412/513 overall, 22/32 age group

We got no pictures.  There's a good reason for this: we're lazy.  Actually I forgot to grab the small camera before we left so we didn't even get the before and after "in the car smiling" shots.  Kelley had the kids with her mom in Myrtle Beach all week!  So the big camera was down there.  And there will be some cute pictures of kids on a cold-ish windy-ish beach to come after they get back.

It's only about 3.5 hours to drive from Raleigh to North Myrtle Beach where they like to stay.  We've gotten a place down there for the last couple of March's.  Bigun is tracked out from school for the month so she's loving it.  She only has one quarter left of first grade!  I can't believe that. I have absolutely loved having the freedom of the wife and kids out of town for a few days.  But Kelley drove back to Raleigh friday night so we could run the race on saturday.

Then after the race we cleaned up a bit and drove back down to MB!  We all got to hang out watching the ACC tournament games, had dinner at Mr Fish - my favorite seafood place down there.  Sunday we played on the beach some, grabbed lunch at one of those racist pancake houses (really?  You named your restaurant Tar Baby?  geez).  And I came on back to Raleigh in the afternoon.  got a big work project kicking off today.

So overall it was a great weekend.  A fun race followed by some time at the beach, with more pictures and maybe more details to come.  And the Tobacco Road full marathon next weekend. There is that.