In order to determine if I was capable of running this race I ran a labored two miles last Wednesday and a much better four miles on Thursday. Sometime this past Friday, after I awoke in the morning and was not hobbling, I decided my leg was sufficiently healed to run the 10K.
I awoke 2:30 Sunday morning to begin preparations for the 8:30 AM race. After assembling all my running gear and a small lunch bag I was out the door at 3:30 AM. Earlier in the week I had programmed my Garmin Nuvi GPS for Middletown NY. The GPS initially calculated an estimated time of arrival of 6:47 AM. The route primarily consisted of two highways, 81 North and 84 East into New York state.
The trip was not eventful, except for a few patches of very dense fog along the way. The sun began to illuminate the countryside a couple of minutes past five o'clock. At about the same time I realized I had left my lunch bag with my energy bars and Gatorade in the kitchen. I also forgot to bring a digital camera to take pictures of the venue.
I decided to use the Nuvi GPS to find the nearest Walmart, which happened to be in a town called Milford, just a stone's throw inside Pennsylvania as you enter New York state on Route 84. I purchased a couple of energy bars and a Port Jervis (NY) Red Raiders t-shirt as a cheap momento of this trip.
I arrived at the Middletown high school around 7:00 AM. The school parking lot was about two-thirds full at the time, but quickly filled up a short time thereafter. I made my way to the registration tables to pick up my running packet. Everything was very well organized. The bib number I had drawn for this race was 265. This marked the first time I had to affix the automated timing device named the D-Tag to my sneaker.
I took a tour of the grounds and noticed the high school had a newly built and somewhat grand football stadium. Instead of a scoreboard with the typical Home and Visitor scores and a painted logo of the school mascot, this high school had a big screen TV as their scoreboard. It was smaller than the TV's found at a college or professional football stadium, but very impressive nonetheless. There was a live video feed of the runners on the track which was displayed on the big screen TV.
The morning's first activity was the Rowley 5-K race and was scheduled to begin at 7:45. A group of over 300 racers lined up for this event. Much to my surprise, a starter's gun was used to begin the race. A local high school boy won the race in 16:37.
There were a host of vendors outside the stadium marketing their services and products as well as handing out free samples. I picked up a strawberry GU energy gel packet to use for the race.
I was very impressed by the overall organization of the event as their were paramedics, local police and very helpful event staff. I joked with my wife afterward the only problem with running a race in New York is that there are New Yorkers in the race. In reality, the racers were all very considerate and friendly.
I did a few warm-up laps around the track before the race. The track was ten lanes wide as opposed to the more typical eight lane track. My leg felt good, but still was not pain free. For only sleeping half a night and driving for three hours, I surprisingly did not feel fatigued or weary.
Frank Shorter, the 1972 and 1976 Olympic marathons winner addressed the crowd at 8:25 using a bullhorn. His comments were difficult to hear as his bullhorn was not sufficiently loud to over power the banter of the runners awaiting the start of the race. I believe he said he was recovering from some sort of physical ailment and would not be running the 10K race.
While waiting at the starting line for the race to begin, I was surprised to hear a woman singing the national anthem for the event. Next to the football stadium, two huge ladder fire trucks had their ladders extended and had a large United States flag draped between them. June 14th being Flag day, the track was adorned with small U.S. flags on wooden blocks in between each lane throughout the entire track. The public address announcer had announced that over 900 racers were ready to run the Classic 10K.
When the starting gun went off, my initial reaction was to begin sprinting down the road. Due to the large number of runners, it was some ten seconds before those in front of me had cleared sufficiently to begin running. There were two finishing times listed in the results; overall time and net time. The net time took into account you may have had to wait to get to the start line after the starter's gun sounded.
During my last two training sessions, I was struggling to run ten minute miles due to my ailing leg. Prior to the race I decided I wanted to average running each mile in the 9:30 to 9:45 time frame. I was hoping my adrenaline would help me achieve sub 10 minutes miles.
Without getting into a mile by mile recap of the race, the first four miles of the race were uphill and the last 2.2 miles were downhill. It seemed a majority of the time I was running uphill followed by downhill runs. My Garmin GPS Forerunner 305 confirmed the hilly nature of the course it calculated 85% of the race was either an ascent or descent with only 15% recorded as being level. An awesome feature of this race was a water station at every mile which was staffed by a plethora of students. I took water at the three mile station with the NU energy gel packet I had picked up from a race vendor. I can't say the NU gel made any discernible impact upon my performance.
I finished the race in 59 minutes and 34 seconds, net time. I finished 602nd out of 926 runners and came in 67th out of 86 racers in the aged 45-49 bracket. Ironically, the aged 45-49 bracket had the most entrants for any individual bracket for this race.
While I believe I can do better than this in the future, my time was indicative of my poorly trained body at the time. One takeaway I had from this race is there were plenty of people my age who were in great shape. I need to retain this change I have made to my lifestyle where I incorporate physical activity into my regimen on nearly a daily basis.
Here's a picture below at the race finish line from the official race photographer, Ken Shelton studios. Can you see the six+ miles of hurt in my eyes ?
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