Richmond Half Marathon 2011

By: Dennis Livesay

DLTHE BACK STORY: Ever since I learned about the automatic qualifying times for the New York Marathon, I’ve been obsessed by the time of 1 hour and 23 minutes. This is the time that I must run to bypass the lottery registration process. Not that I’ve been dying to run New York. Rather, the time was only important in the abstract notion that it was a time that others deemed significant, and it was seemingly within reach of my current 1:24:27 half marathon PR. All summer, I would incessantly bore anyone that had the misfortune of asking what I was training for with my goal of 1:23. However, I really suffered through the heat, and had largely dismissed my chance of hitting the mark. In fact, in the months leading up to Richmond I softened my goals to breaking 1:24…it would still be a PR, albeit a lesser PR without the vague external validation that would come from qualifying for a race that you don’t necessarily want to do. Yes, it’s sad, but I am that vain.

On the other hand, training over the past 3-4 weeks has been going better than ever. I was running and racing well, and most importantly, recovering quickly. Coach Hadley’s seemingly simple plan of work your ass off up to a point, but no more, was leading to the speed that I had so desperately wanted all summer. Thus, in the back of my mind, I did think 1:23 was possible…but only if the stars and moon were perfectly aligned.

RACE WEEK: The only thing that mattered this week was my goal time, imprecisely defined as it was. It became my white whale. I slept bunches, knowing that extra sleep = a few more seconds. I avoided stress and either got my work done early or unapologetically ignored it. This was a distraction free zone. Unexpectedly, my biggest distractions occurred while training. With all the hard work done, training was relatively light, which gave me plenty of time to obsess about phantom aches and pains. Tellingly, all of which have vanished as quickly as they appeared as I write this the day after.

PRE-RACE AND LAUREN: The weather was nearly perfect, cool but sunny and warming quickly. Lauren and I got to the race in plenty of time, despite my less than stellar navigating skills. The only negative on race morning was that Lauren forgot her Garmin…I was crestfallen. Perhaps there was some degree of transference going on, but I was seriously bummed about this. Richmond was Lauren’s second half marathon. Unlike her first in May, she had trained very hard and very consistently for it. She was primed for a big-time PR. I was nearly as nervous for her as I was for me (…nearly, but not quite). I tried to shake my concern for her forgotten Garmin, but couldn’t. Jumping forward, I shouldn’t have worried. Lauren ran solely on feel and absolutely killed it. Her time of 1:39:53 is a 10+ minute PR. I am so proud of her!

THE EARLY MILES: Back to me. My goal was to run the first mile conservatively in 6:35, and then run 6:24’ish pace through 10K. 6:24’s = a finishing time of 1:24, whereas 6:20’s = 1:23. The most important thing was to not go too deep in the first part of the race, so that I would have enough to race the finishing stretch. As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I went out in the first mile in 6:25, and quickly zoned in on sub-6:20 pace. I knew it was faster than my target, but it felt manageable.

Around mile 3 I saw a familiar face, at least one that looked familiar. I asked the runner next to me if he was from Charlotte, and it turns out he was. While Derrick (Hewett) and I had never met before, I recognized him from random Charlotte races. He and a third runner in our “group” were shooting for a time in 1:21-1:22 range. I made a mental note of this, and after mile 3 both ran away from me. I tried to keep them in sight, but they gapped me by a huge distance.

My 10K split was 39:31, which is 6:22 pace, only 16 seconds off my 10K PR. Much faster than planned, but the effort seemed about right, hopefully.

The random things that go through our head while running can be quite unexpected. Throughout the early miles I was trying to distract myself by coming up with a mantra to keep me going. I’ve “borrowed” the Smooth is Fast mantra in the past, but it didn’t seem to be working. Run Tall is simple and encourages good running form. No love there either. In fact, none of the usual suspects were clicking. Strangely, the only thing that did click was, Ain’t no party like a P-Funk party! Somehow George Clinton had invaded my running space. This was completely out of place and weird, sorta like this paragraph, but I decided to just go with it. Funkadelic!

BRYAN PARK: Miles 7 and 8 go trough the picturesque Bryan Park. Mile 7 (split = 6:10) is primarily downhill and a runner flew past me like a Learjet passing a Piper Cub. I muttered some words of encouragement, and he responded, “I hope I didn’t go out too hard.” I unconsciously picked up the pace as he pulled away to keep him in sight. Mile 8 is primarily uphill and I slowed a bit (split = 6:22). However, my relative speed seemed to increase to those in front of me. I passed 3 or 4, including Derrick from Charlotte. A few mutual words of encouragement, and then I decided it was time to ratchet it up a notch.

IT’S GO TIME: Miles 9 through 11 were 6:12, 6:13 and 6:11. I passed several, including catching and dropping the Learjet. I took way too much pleasure in recognizing that he indeed did go out too hard. I could tell that I was putting time into everyone around me as the gap ahead was closing, and no one was coming up from behind. I never actually checked the gap, but I inferred this to be the case since the police let cars pass immediately after I crossed an intersection multiple times. This simple fact strangely gave me big confidence boost.

Miles 12 and 13 were 6:06 and 6:01. The finish is very tough. It starts with an uphill false flat, which is made so much worse because you know soon there will be the fast downhill to the finish. I was really starting to labor at this point, and so just focused on form. I also started having difficulty thinking clearly…I couldn’t remember for sure if we were in the tenth or eleventh mile.  I asked the guy next to me and after some mental gymnastics, we came decided that we’re in mile 12…only 1.1 to go after the next split. Where is that freak’n downhill?! As I labored, I reminded myself that if George Clinton could play till 2 AM at his age, then I could a easily run a measly couple more miles (strange, but true). I continued to pick off runners, a couple of which latched on as I passed. All told, I caught about 12-15 runners after the 10K split, and (other than Learjet) no one passed me.

The last two-tenths or so miles are a fast and steep downhill. I suck at going downhill and two (perhaps three?) guys passed me back on the downhill. No matter, just focus on form. I squinted to see the clock, but couldn’t make it out. Just run. I squinted some more, it looked like 1:2x??? …ugh, I couldn’t make it out. Was it a 1:22:xx or 1:23:xx or 1:24:xx? I couldn’t tell. Finally, a few steps before the line I realized that it was 1:22…I couldn’t believe my eyes. I crossed the line in 1:22:13. Later, my chip time was revealed to be 1:22:09, which is 6:16 pace. A PR by 2 minutes and 18 seconds.

DL1

I was amazed and very proud of myself. Pride might be one of the seven deadly sins, but so be it. I was excited! And making it so much sweeter was that fact that I had beaten some arbitrary goal that someone else had defined for entry into an event that I had little intention of actually doing. And yes, I do know New York qualifying times have gotten much tougher after next year, but I’m going to milk my fabricated success for all the hypothetical glory that I can anyway. Deal with it.

POST-RACE ANALYSIS: In an effort to make my race reports a bit more than just an exercise in narcissism (cf. my Virginia Beach report), I’ve decided to list the things that worked well and those that didn’t for future planning.

What did work:

  • This is my second Richmond Half. Last year I stayed downtown at the race hotel, while convenient, it was crowded and the dinning options were limited. This time we stayed about 10 miles west in a bedroom (shopping) community. It was perfect. Lots of eating choices, including a Whole Foods, and it was easy to get from the hotel to the start on race day. Also, having the car loaded with post-race cookies for the drive back was a great idea.
  • Because of Max, we turned the lights out at 8:30 PM the night before the race. I slept well and then woke up at 4:45 on race day. This gave me plenty of personal time to get ready and reflect on the race before Lauren and Max woke up.
  • Lauren’s Mom came with us and watched Max while we raced. They stayed back at the hotel, so Lauren and I didn’t have to worry with him. This was a really nice reprieve.
  • The temperature was ~34 degrees at the start. I warmed-up in an old cycling jacket, which I wore to, and then ditched at, the start corral. For the race, I had on a hat, some disposable gloves and an old pair of arm warmers, all of which I planned to ditch during the race. I actually shed the arm warmers before the start. Ditched the hat after only a mile…it was a great hat and I shouldn’t have worn it to begin with. I ditched the gloves coming out of the park. All told, I was never too cold, nor too warm. And my new UCRR singlet was awesome!
  • In all prior half marathons, I have taken a gel after 6-8 miles. This time, I took a gel ~10 minutes prior to the start, and never took another. This seemed to work very well.

What did not work:

  • Trusting Lauren to remember her own Garmin.
  • I mapped the directions from the start of the race to the hotel, instead of vice versa. As such, the one-way streets on the directions were not accessible to us. Yep, apparently I can be that dumb.
  • Scheduling SNAFU. My colleague was organizing a session at the INFORMS annual meeting, which is currently underway in Charlotte. INFORMS is an organizational research society, which has some data visualization overlap with my research. She asked me to speak at the meeting some time ago, but when I agreed I never expected my talk to be on Sunday at 8 AM. Who in the $@#& has technical sessions on a Sunday morning?! Anyway, my only option was to drive home after the race. We had time to shower and grab lunch, but the drive sucked big time. We were all wiped out by the time we got home.
  • I’m definitely not one of those zealots that naively believe in the accuracy of Garmin. Like all measurements, there is an associated intrinsic error. Last year Garmin measured the Richmond course at 13.15, whereas it was 13.20 this year. (And yes, I do refer to Garmin in the third person). In both cases, I believe the course length was actually correct, and the error is largely inconsequential. However, the difference does affect the way I track my progress (see below). (Note: I don’t think the difference is simply a matter of tangents…both times I ran the tangents well. Rather, the differences simply reflect a lack of precision, which also frequently occurs on my training routes.)
  • When I race, I generally have two items displayed on my Garmin: lap pace and average pace. In training, I also have distance, but the third item makes everything too small to see when racing. However, there are two problems this approach in longer races.

-    First, like I mentioned above, it’s easy to forget which mile you’re on once the brain starts to seize.

-    Second, while I have roughly memorized average pace to finish time conversions, this breaks down when Garmin is off. By the end of Richmond, Garmin was off by almost a full tenth of a mile. Garmin had my average pace at 6:14, which meant that I was ahead of schedule. However, I also had to add back the roughly 30 seconds that Garmin was off due to overestimating the distance covered. Over the late stages of the race, dealing with this was akin to trying to differentiate a nonlinear multivariable function in my head. Not possible.

-    In the future, I’m going to run with elapsed time so I know exactly what time I’m at. I’ll also use lap pace to get an estimate of my current pace, but am going to turn off the autolap feature so that I know my actual mile splits. Or I could just pull a Lauren and race sans watch.