Race Report: Manhattan Half Marathon

After all the fun I’ve been having in the pool and training for Boston, I almost forgot to get stressed out over the first NYC borough half marathon of the year. So yesterday was the Manhattan Half, two 6-mile loops of Central Park plus 1.1 in case you hadn’t had enough. I didn’t take any pictures because I forgot my camera and besides, pictures from races all start to look the same after a while anyway.

It was 31 degrees, cloudy, and crowded. Just under 5000 would finish, and that seemed about right considering the droves of pushy runners around. After finishing a moderately-difficult tempo run on Friday, and an overly-long (10 miles) easy run on Saturday, I went into the race too tired and I should’ve known better. But just having one sport to think about, or obsess about over the course of the day was a welcome change.

Funny thing was, and this used to never happen, I kept running into people I knew, before and after. I’d planned to meet up with running pal Susie before the race, and did, but it was just one acquaintance after another, on the course and past the finish line. Later on, a runner came up to me and said ‘Philly?’, and as it turned out it was someone I didn’t know who had seen me running in my old gym in Philadelphia three years ago, and had remembered me. Small running world.

Well, I could go on about the usual race stuff, people running too slowly who get right up front, nylon pants-wearers making that constant swish-swish noise, hearing ‘Born to be Wild’ blasted out of some runner’s headphones from ten feet away (I’m not trying to be funny, that actually happened)… but I won’t. But I will say the race was tiring, and I pushed myself to the 80-85% threshold, and that got real old on the rolling hills of CP. The last steep-and-unhappy hill was at mile 11, and I was cursing it even though I’ve run it a million times. And I had planned to race with running friend Tim, then I couldn’t get up to the marker where we were supposed to meet before the start, and I spent the whole race running just a little bit faster to find him up ahead. I never did, and later on we met up after the race and it was only then I discovered that he’d been stuck in a port-a-john line at the beginning, started late, and was running behind me the whole time. He still beat my finish/chip time, so I’m going to have to work in a little kick-ass rematch in the spring. He’s a roll-out-of-bed-and-run-a-PR kind of runner, and I just hate that, but then again, so am I sometimes, so I’ll shut the F up.

After finishing at an average pace I shouldn’t have done (7:04), I was definitely fatigued. And as it would turn out, soaking wet under the layers, and despite checking extra clothing and throwing it all on later I still managed to get the shivers and chills that left me more tired than before. I don’t live too far away from these races, but a 20-minute post-race walk in freezing temperatures when you’ve got wet layers on is both difficult and stupid, planning-wise. But I kept running into people, and yakking, and I’ll just have to save that crap for warmer races.

So I acquitted myself well in the race, though no PR, but that’s OK. There’s another half in The Bronx in two weeks, so we’ll see about that one. In the meantime, my swimming coach took pity on me this morning in my pre-dawn workout; my quads were feeling tired as I recreated the first ten minutes of the movie ‘Jaws’, and believe me, I wasn’t playing the shark.