Race Roundup

Quite a weekend for running, lots of news…

Boston Marathon
As anyone who lives in the northeast knows, Sunday’s weather was horrendously wet. Going outside was like standing in the shower with your clothes on. So the forecast for Monday in Boston and the marathon was for 40 degrees, big wind gusts and heavy rain; wind chills in the 20s.

Sunday afternoon CNN reported that the BAA would make an announcement about whether or not Boston would be canceled. Yeah, right. The only way they’d cancel the marathon would be if an asteroid was heading for Hopkinton AND Bruce Willis was unavailable.

So on Monday morning, after surfing around several hundred cable channels, we actually found live coverage on the new-to-us Versus channel, including announcers explaining dumb stuff we all knew already and an amazing number of commercial breaks… Funny how slow world-class runners look when filmed running towards a moving camera. For a minute, it makes you think, ‘gee, I can run that fast, that looks pretty easy’. Uh huh. You couldn’t run that fast if your pants were on fire.

Anyway, the rain poured, the wind stopped and started again and again, the temperature started to drop, and it seemed very unpleasant from our vantage point on the couch and accompanying bag of potato chips. Glad we didn’t train for Boston this year! But we still felt sorry for the 20,000+ runners dealing with all that rain and wind on Heartbreak Hill. Which just reminds us that on race day, anything can happen. You can train and train, but you have to remember that on some race days that PR ain’t going to happen. Besides doing the best you can, you really have to be philosophical about how well you do and how some things are uncontrollable, and to see the experience as part of a bigger picture. Easy for us to say on some snarky blog, but it’s true. You can push yourself, but that doesn’t include beating yourself up.

Well, it ended up as the slowest finish in 30 years, so the weather really did make a difference. We’re glad it at least started earlier so everyone could get home sooner for a bowl of soup and a nice, hot cup of coffee. If you ran Boston, or have run Boston, God bless you.

Brooklyn Half Marathon
The course is too hilly at the end, but the weather was spectacular Saturday morning. Thank you, Jesus! The predicted 6000 runners actually turned out to be 4900, but since the race started on the Coney Island boardwalk, the usual traffic jam at the start was much better than recent races in Central Park. Can’t get too cranky about it all, especially since the weather 24 hours later would become so dreadful.

One thing though: we’d just read an article in Runner’s World about a study of several runners and how fast their starting pace affects finish time. In other words, do you start out slow and pick it up, or start out fast and keep or increase the pace? Turns out the runners who started faster finished sooner than those who ramped up to the same pace. With that in mind, we started fast. Perhaps a little too fast, since on the last 3 miles of rolling hills we slowed down an extra 10-15 seconds a mile. But we were happy with our finish time, it was our best half marathon time in six years. So should you always start out fast? Depends on the distance… and no sprinting, just keep a steady pace that you can maintain without getting too winded. Anyway, try it out sometime. And maybe don’t read running articles right before races!

Iraq (Boston) Marathon
Over the weekend, over 300 American (military) runners fought heat and a sandstorm to finish a marathon in Iraq as an homage to the one in Boston. Next time you complain to yourself about how bad it is on the race course you’re on, remember what these folks went through on theirs. Enough said.

Paris Marathon, etc.
Our favorite marathon saw much warmer temperatures than in Boston, and a winner from Qatar, of all places. Kind of refreshing to hear about a winner from a country you wouldn’t think was even represented. Not too far away, at the Rotterdam Marathon, the warm weather (25°C or 77°F) was a big factor, so apparently Europe got hot weather for all their races on Sunday. Only one runner finished below 2:10 in Rotterdam, so there you go.

Anyway, nice to see the race schedule pick up in a big way, even though the weather sucked during the marathons. With all of this activity going on, maybe more non-runners will have learned a little more about what running is all about. Guess there’s a silver lining to any nor’easter cloud.