Last year I put all of my running effort towards extremely long distances – marathons. I was regularly doing 15+ mile runs (before I got injured), and barely felt warmed up before running 3 or 4 miles. This year I’ve barely run over 6 or 7 miles at a time, with the exceptions of the Shamrock 15k in March and the Eugene Half Marathon in May. This thought didn’t occur to me until right before I was lining up for the Tillamook Bay 10k. I was grateful that I did have a couple 6-7 mile runs to rely on from the past few weeks, but running 6 miles is one thing – racing 6 miles is another. As the race was about to begin I experienced part concern and part intrigue (and part sleepiness, as I often do at the start of morning races).
I had heard that the winner got a $500 cash prize, so I thought I would just throw caution to the wind and try to stay with the first place woman for as long as I could and see what happened. It turned out that I was the first place woman… for about three minutes. Then this lady with a white hat and little shorts with a sports bra passed me. I had been expecting this, as women who wear a sports bra with no shirt to races are usually fast. Probably because only women with great abs are willing to wear such an outfit, and usually if your abs are that great then your speed is too. I thought about staying with her, but she got pretty far ahead pretty quick, so I let her go.
Other than the $500 I could be missing out on, I wasn’t too upset about not getting first place. Especially since I almost never get first place. I was actually surprised to stay in second place for about the next 4 miles. For a while I thought I must be running really fast, because I got to the mile 2 mark in 12:50, which is way faster than I usually run. Later I realized that whoever put out the mile markers must not have been very concerned with accuracy, because according to them it took me 14 minutes to run my fourth mile. I had slowed down a little, but not that much. At the end of this mile some high school girl passed me. I tried to chat with her about how crazy the mile markers were, but she was apparently busy with something else (like running maybe?) and all but ignored me.
Somehow I made it to the end without anyone else passing me, making me the 3rd place champion! Then I found out that there was actually only a $500 cash prize for the first place overall winner, not for men and women, so I extra didn’t care that I didn’t win first place. I was confused why I didn’t get a gift basket though, as I was 3rd overall for women, and 1st in my age group, and there were two gift baskets full of Tillamook cheeses and things left over at the end that nobody got. I even had a dream last night that they called to apologize for not giving me a gift basket and came to deliver it to me. Luckily the guy I went to the race with won 1st place champion, so he got all the money and will hopefully buy me things with it soon.
I would tell you more about this race, like how they handed out entire water bottles at the water stations along the course that nobody could drink more than two sips of (because it’s hard to drink a lot while you’re running), but then had no water at the finish line, but I have to go to work.
1 Comment
now i’m going to dream about cheese baskets too.