P.B. and Joy

Not only did I beat the bridge, I beat my goal for the first two miles AND I beat my personal best five-mile time. In short, I rock.

There were three waves of runners starting 5 minutes apart--fastest runners first, to avoid bottlenecking. I was in the last wave--8 minute miles and up (8 minutes! in my dreams), and managed to get near the front. We did indeed have timing chips--the first time this race has had them, they proudly announced--so I decided only to use my watch to time the first two miles so that I would know exactly how long it would take me to beat the bridge.

Between the new, faster (170-180 bpm) playlist on my iPod and the race-day adrenaline my Sis was talking about, my watch read 18:37 as I crossed the bridge. That's 2 miles at 9:18 per mile. Awesome. I pressed "stop" on my watch and kept running.

Past the bridge, I decided to slow down a bit, switching to my 160-170 bpm playlist for the last three miles. I only walked for about five seconds through the last water stop. The finish line was at the 50-yard line of the stadium, and as I entered the field, I felt like a total rock star...until I had to come to a complete stop about 10 feet from the finish line.

Remember when I said this was the first year they'd used timing chips? Yeah, well...let's just say they had a few kinks to work out. Like having volunteers collecting them only ten feet past the finish line, so that people were stopping to take them off, thus creating a huge backup of people that extended to before the finish line. And since the sensor pad that tells your timing chip to stop timing is ON the finish line, and I don't know how long it took me to walk (shuffle) that last ten feet through the huge throngs of people, I will never know exactly how long it took me to run the race.

I did look at the clock as I stopped, and it read 56:57. So I committed that number to memory and plugged it into a pace calculator when I got home. The result per mile was about 11 and a half minutes, and I KNEW I hadn't run it that slow. So I was in a pretty bad mood all day, despairing of ever knowing how quicly I had run this race.

That night I was lying in bed feeling sorry for myself, when I had a revelation. Remember when I said there were three waves of runners, and I was in the last wave, and they all started five minutes apart? They started the clock for the first wave! Which meant if I subtracted ten minutes from the time on the clock and THEN plugged it into the pace calculator, I'd have a pretty good idea of my average pace. Sure enough, the result came back: I had run a 4.97 mile race in 46:57 minutes, averaging--get this--9:27 per mile. That's more like it!

A (darling) side note: when I got home, The Boy gave me a run-down of what he did with the Cricket while I was gone. The games they played, what she ate...and he finished his summary with, "And then at 8:40, we ran around the house really fast." Um...great! I couldn't figure out the significance. Seeing my confusion, he asked, "That's when your wave started, right? 8:40?"

Awwww.