By the morning of last Sunday’s 10k race, I was beginning to think I’d made a huge mistake.
First of all, I was not only running myself, but bringing along 11 other people to run in either the 5k or 10k race. (See my blog entry below.) It was a first event for eight of those people (my parents, my sister and her two children, my best buddy, her husband and one of her sons). I was really hoping they would all have fun and that they didn’t feel they’d been dragged into running by their over-enthusiastic daughter/sister/parent/friend (i.e. me).
Second, in addition to running the 10k, I was hosting my family for the Thanksgiving weekend. I love it – really love it. But it does involve some effort to host two big dinners (Saturday and Sunday), coordinate comfortable sleeping arrangements for eight extra people, and plan our activities for 48 hours. My type-A brain has been going a million miles a minute over the past week, waking me up early, keeping me busy during my free moments, and even preventing me from getting in that last brief run I needed on Friday or Saturday.
Third, I had the worst night’s sleep I’ve had in recent memory on Saturday night. Some teenagers at a nearby house were having a backyard party that lasted until well into the wee hours of the morning. Even more offensive than their loud talk was the fact that they played The Backstreet Boys as their party soundtrack. Three a.m. party music sure has changed since I was a teenager. I finally fell asleep at about 3:30 a.m. and was awake again when my early-rising father got up at 6:05. He was nervous and excited about walking the 10k.
Still, I felt surprisingly okay on Sunday morning. I have run two 10k races before. My first took me almost 65 minutes. The second took 58 minutes. Before the sleepless night from hell, I was hoping to do a little better than this. On the drive out to the race location, I began to think that a more realistic goal, given my lack of sleep and preoccupation with preparing a big Thanksgiving dinner later that day, would be to at least crack 60 minutes. Or just finish the damned thing.
The race was held just east of the City of Ottawa, at the Cumberland Heritage Village Museum, which is a very pretty, hilly area nestled among farmers’ fields and overlooking the Ottawa River. Notice how I slipped the word “hilly” in there like it’s no big deal? We arrived, strapped on our Velcro ankle-chip-thingies, visited the porta-potties and tried to stay warm in the 10° Celsius morning air (little realizing that I should have been thankful that we didn’t face the terrible heat other runners did that weekend). The 5k-ers in our party then headed to their start line, and the 10k-ers (me, my husband, and my dad), headed to ours.
While we waited for the race to begin, I ran into a friend who had run this race before. I asked her about the terrain and she told me there were two hills, but that they weren’t too bad. My dad was feeling a little stressed about his ability to follow the route, since there were very few walkers and he would well to the back of the pack. I found the race leaders and they assured him there would be big orange cones marking the route. Dad’s goal was to walk the route in less than 2 hours and 30 minutes and preferably in closer to 2 hours.
Despite all my misgivings, I started to get really pumped up just before the race. I was very happy that I didn’t indulge in a lot of red wine the night before. My husband and I passed the last 10 minutes before the race running out and back on the first 25 metres of the route at a very gentle pace, just to get warm. My dad walked the same stretch to get his knee limbered up. A minute or two before the start, we took our places in the pack – my husband relatively near the front (he was aiming to improve on a 47-minute 10k he ran in the spring), me somewhere optimistically in the middle, and my dad a little closer to the back. We all wished each other luck. Then we were off.
My strategy was to run each kilometre in about 5:45. Add in a 1-minute walk break at the 30-minute mark and – voila! - a nice tidy 56-minute 10k. In theory. For the first kilometre, it was a brilliant strategy. I passed the 1k marker at 5:30, made a simple mathematical calculation (5:30 x 10) and began to hope I would run the race in 53 minutes. I should know better.
The next 4 or 5 kilometres of the race were uphill. There were, for the record, three hills, not two. They were not particularly steep and I felt pretty strong but I lost a little time on each one. I hit the 5k marker at about 31 minutes. Uh oh. I decided to walk for about 40 seconds, taking me up to 32 minutes, and then really try to boot it for the remainder of the race.
Then …Glory Hallelujah! … the course started to run downhill. The next 3k were amazing. I did something my husband does, which is to choose a runner slightly ahead of me and try to pass them. This motivated me to increase my pace, rather than get too comfortable. Plus it was kind of fun. Goodbye hip-hop teenager running in shiny track pants! So long, cutesy couple running together! Au revoir football-jock-gone-to-seed! Okay, I wasn’t passing Kenyan record-setters, but it worked for me.
The last runner I passed was a gray-haired, long-legged athletic-looking older woman who was setting an excellent pace. It took me a long time to catch up with her. I’m ashamed to say that one of the big thrills of the race was beating this nice older lady. Afterwards, I kept looking over my shoulder to see if she’d pass me again, because she was a fast old lady.
Rounding the last corner, with about 25 metres to go, I saw my husband, sons, nephew and friends cheering me on from the sidelines. By now, I realized that I hadn’t made a mistake to join this run, and felt very clever to have brought along my own cheering section. I zipped past my mom and my 11-year-old niece who were just wrapping up a comfortable 5k walk. Final time: 57:43, making me 13 out of 26 in my age category. I’ve never made it out of the bottom third before – woohoo, I’m average!!
We were all finished now, except for my dad, the 10k walker. We shared a collective runners’ high and trade stories. Some folks headed home to prepare for Thanksgiving festivities later on that day, but three of us remained to see my dad cross the finish line. At an hour and 30 minutes into the race, we decided to find a good spot on the sidelines to relax and watch for him. We had barely gotten settled when he came around the corner, making incredible time. For the last stretch, I ran along beside him like a fool shouting “Go Dad, Yay Dad!” The other spectators along the way picked up on my enthusiasm and his determination and took up the cheer. He crossed the finish line in 1 hour and 33 minutes! He told me later that all the cheering really made him feel like a champ – which he is.
Anyways, it was a great day. At Thanksgiving Dinner that evening, we carried out our annual tradition of going around the table saying what we were grateful for. Many of us talked about the blessing of good health that allowed us to participate in the race earlier that day. I read a quote from Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town: “Do human beings ever realize life while they live it – every, every minute?” I felt like that day, at least, we had.
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