Sierra Vista Rotary Club Half Race Report
On November 2nd, I raced the Sierra Vista Rotary Club Half Marathon. Here’s a look into how I prepared, how I executed the race, and how it turned out.
Prerace
Goal: Practice pre-marathon nutrition, eat as much as a can and find what works.
Narrative: I woke up at 5:30, exactly 2 hours before the start and at a Dave’s Bagel (Sponsor me) with a liberal coating of honey. I made a cup of coffee and drank that on the way to the course and got there at 6:30. I started my warmup at about 6:45 with 1-mile, then caught up with Zach and Paul and did about two more miles with them. By the time we finished, I had just enough time to change in to race shoes and do 3-4 strides and some quick dynamic stretches.
By the time we moved over to the start line, I was feeling great. My stomach was regular, I was hydrated, and not to go into too much detail but I was feeling ~light~.
Race:
Goal: I always tier my goals so that I can know what my next goal is if things turn out to be easier than I thought. This sounds big-headed, but if you put ‘place first’ as a goal and within the first mile find yourself far out front, it’s good to have a time goal to jump to, or vice versa.
My focus for this event was to race, not to time trial. If it were a flat course I could set a realistic time, but with the elevation profile of the course, I wasn’t sure what my pace would be and didn’t think it would correlate to my marathon pace.
1. Run even, don’t blow up on the 2nd half
2. Second place finish (earn back my entry fee)
3. First place
I train with Zach almost every day. He’s more fit than me, and in pre-race, he’d discussed going out in 6:10 then trying to run a faster downhill second half. My hope was if I could stay in contact with him on the first half, it would put him off mentally enough to give me and edge on the way down, but I was mainly concerned with getting my race fee back, and I knew that with the elevation gain, there was every possibility that going out too hard would end in a cramp when the legs started spinning on the second half.
Elevation Profile
Narrative: I stuck to Zach’s heels through about the first mile and a half. In that time, I committed to not looking at my watch and not looking behind me. I regret the latter. I think I would have realized quickly that nobody was even close to either of us, or even if I had blown up, I could have beaten them to the finish. At about mile 1.5 I was feeling like the pace was a little fast, and since I was focused on not blowing up, I broke contact by about 10s with Zach.
I expected Zach to open this gap more, but he held this gap to 10s. We continued this way until mile 4.5 when the uphill really started. Just prior to that, I at my whole packet of Stinger Chews, which amounts to about 160 calories and 38g carbs. I wanted to get this out of the way before we started uphill and the mental and physical effort got harder. I was closing the gap slightly on Zach, but I could tell both of us were working hard. I got to within about 5s with him. At mile six, I started to look for the turnaround, and it wasn’t till about 400m after that when I realized half of 13.1 is not, in fact, 6. We covered the last half mile and hit the turnaround.
The night before we raced, my wife and I had dinner with Zach and his wife. We didn’t talk about our tactics, but one thing struck me. Zach had the word “control” written on his hand. It was his focus for the race, to maintain a controlled pace and effort throughout the race.
Well, as we started won Ramsey Canyon, I can tell you what I was thinking: “I’m out of control.” You don’t realize how steep a hill is until you’re going down, and in Vaporflys and chasing, I lost control of my body. To make matters worse, there were cars going up and down the canyon. We had the shoulder marked off with cones, but all throughout the course, parts of the pavement were cracked or uneven. I mostly stayed on the road to prevent turning an ankle. Going downhill there were runners coming up as well who blocked that lane. The traffic got so bad that at one point, two cars stopped, one going up and one going down with a runner trying to pass in the shoulder, so I just ran around both on the opposite side trying not to break my leg on their bumper.
By the time I made this maneuver around the car, Zach had put a good distance between us. At the bottom of the hill, about mile 8.5, things started to level out and I saw he was a good 30s+ ahead of me. I accepted my defeat here and rode out the last 3.5 miles, enjoying how flat it was and trying to keep the pace as honest as I could in preparation for Tucson, which will have a steady decline. I continued to drink water at every stop and got motivated when we joined up with the 5k runners.
I ended up averaging a 6:22, although we missed a turn at some point which put our half at 12.85 miles, so I won’t focus on the overall time.
Post Race
In post, Zach and I joined up and ran toward the oncoming runners. We saw Paul leading and give him a big cheer as he gapped fourth place definitively in the last mile. We then ran around the baseball field for about 4 miles to get our daily tally up to 20. I mostly used this as an excuse to drink as many blue Gatorades as I could.
Reflection
I hit my 1st and 2nd goals. Additionally, the course gave me a lot of confidence going into Tucson. I was able to run 2 miles under 6:00 with some pretty serious decline and another to at 6:07 with about 130m of decline each. The key here is this came after 6.5 miles of steady and at times significant uphill, meaning I can still spin the wheels after putting a lot of stress on my quads. 6:22 average with 1k elevation gain makes me more confident in putting up a similar average with 2k elevation loss. Additionally, I wore a heart rate monitor which had me down to 170 on a 6:02 mile with 135 ft of loss. For me, it’s good to see my heart rate wasn’t the limiting factor and I can certainly hold that effort for the marathon.
Water loss has been my enemy in the past 8 weeks of training. Sierra Vista averages about 25% humidity. On all my long runs, water loss is more significant than I realized. The week prior, during a 20-mile run, I drank ~35 oz of water and still ended up dehydrated. In this race, I drank about 2oz of water every 2 miles and still ended up very dehydrated.
Lastly, although I achieved my first and second goals, I was disappointed that I didn’t fully commit to racing. When Zach gapped me at mile 1.5, I should gone with him. I allowed my fear of blowing up to dictate my move, and I let him win in those first two miles. I don’t think I would have beaten him anyways, but I do think local racing on a slow course is all about giving it a run. Zach deserved to have me push him, and I owed it to myself to test my racing acumen, not just my fitness. It’s a local race, after all; the stakes couldn’t be lower, so why not go for it?
Running is all about facing your fear. Often, when I’m coaching athletes in a big workout, they’ll get on the start line and say something like “okay, here we go.” I have to stop them. Why is that your attitude, but on your easy jogs, you don’t have the same anxiety? If you dig deep enough into yourself, you’ll often find its fear. Not fear of pain, but fear of failure. Usually, it’s because we attach performance in a workout to our overall expectations of our fitness. “If I can do 3 x 5 miles at my marathon pace, I can run my marathon in five weeks at that pace.” Contrarily, of course, if you blow up, you won’t be able to run your marathon at that pace. You aren’t as great as you thought you were or as you hoped you were, or maybe as you’ve been telling yourself and others you are.
Part of running is dissolving these expectations. The more I coach, the more I realize any single workout isn’t correlated to outcomes in a race. On the racing side, it’s worth asking yourself “what’s the point?” We aren’t professional athletes, so a loss at the local Rotary Club Half is just the cost of your entry, but a win is the kind of thing you can’t get anywhere else. We must remind ourselves that racing is about that visceral feeling of being head-to-head with someone. It’s the original sport. It’s a feeling we only get in racing, and as amateurs, you don’t race enough to sacrifice the few opportunities you get to run for the win.
I learned a good lesson in this race, and it’s a mistake I hope not to make again. Not every race is small enough to go for the win, but when you get that chance, you have to take it. Luckily, Tucson is small enough that I can shoot for a podium finish.