The weather was perfect (37°, wind chill of 32°) which left me shivering at the start line, but is great for fast running. (Even that cold, I just wore shorts and a short sleeve shirt.) I'd gone out and run most (but not all) of the course the previous week and discovered something not often seen in these parts: hills. I didn't realize that St. Charles had so many hills - but there they were. So, I spent the last week feeling nervous that I wouldn't be able to recapture the speed I had in the last half marathon, which I felt had gone extremely well.
I did a warm up of perhaps half a mile and headed for the starting line where I had two nice surprises. First, there were pacers! And one for 1:30! This took a bit of the onus off me to figure out how to pace myself for my goal - now all I had to do was run it. The other nicety was that with the pacers lined up, it kept all the slow people off the starting line (a pet peeve of mine).
Off we went. Early on I was sitting in about 20th place over all, and the pace group took off and did the first mile, a gentle uphill, in about 6:30, which I suppose is attributable to the excitement of the race. After the first mile or two, we settled in right on pace with our group of about a half dozen runners. If only that was all the excitement in the first miles.
About 1.5 miles in, the course went through a park, and when the path split, we all took the wrong turn. In a bad case of follow the leader, we took the wrong turn because the people in front of us took the wrong turn. Based on what I have read on facebook about the race, everyone but the first few runners took the wrong turn. There was no sign or person to give any indication which way to go and some early runner, who could no longer see the leaders guess wrong on a 50/50 choice (not the runners fault at all). I was reasonably certain, even as we got there, that we were making a mistake, but peer pressure is a powerful thing. Besides, there was a possibility that I was wrong (I'd never even been on that path before), or that the course map on the internet was wrong, or that we were running the race in reverse of what I though, and would hit that section on the way back on the course instead of the way out. But off we went, chugging along. When we hit the 4-mile marker less less than 20 minutes into the race, it was clear that something was wrong, but at that point, what can you do but keep going?
I don't have a fancy watch to keep all the mile split times, but with our excellent pacer, I'm pretty sure those splits would have been very steady as we went through some parks, a neighborhood, along a medium sized road and into a nature preserve. I really don't know what to say about the majority of the course. There were some hills, and we ran as fast as we dared. For the most part our group stayed together pretty well, and I never got more than about 10 feet behind (or 2 feet ahead of) the pacer. I was afraid that if I let him open up a gap any bigger than that, I'd never have the strength to catch up. We all talked very little. I had hopes that since our wrong turn was so early in the course, the race directors would have an hours worth of time to figure out how to fix the mistake. In the end, they opted to do nothing, and left the majority of runners to finish the course well short of the correct distance.
But, of course, during the race there are more important things to think about. Keep running. Don't trip. Keep running. Around mile 9 I was worried that I wouldn't be able to hold the pace. It was gradually getting more and more difficult to keep the pace. Keep running. Two swallows of Gatorade must have been enough to keep me going another mile.
In the final mile, once it was clear that the mistake had not been fixed and the race was going to be very, very short, four of us who were still together agreed that we all wanted to make up the mileage we missed before we crossed the finish line, and, as the only local of the group, I got to lead us on our new adventure. The race course had a right turn about thirty yards before the finish line. We didn't turn, the GPS watches read 11.90 miles at that point, so we had to keep going away from the finish line for six tenths of a mile, and then turn around and go back. As we ran right past the big barricade to keep cars off the race course, and obviously missing the finish line that was right there, I only said to the race marshal, "We know." And off we went.
Somehow in the final two miles, I felt great. We made it out 0.6 miles without hitting a dead end, and on the last six tenths back to the finish line, I was the fastest of our quartet, though I probably didn't open up more than a couple of seconds over the other runners. The clock at the finish said 1:28:32. I had hoped for 1:29:59, and somehow had beaten that by a minute and a half. That's a 6:46/mile pace! The GPS watches in our group said we did 13.1 miles, and when I mapped it online I came up with 13.21 miles, so I'm counting it.
Unlike many of the runners, we had actually run a half marathon. Post race, as it started to sink in how everything had happened, I got a little bitter at working hard to prepare for a race and to have it get messed up like that. They had someone on a microphone encouraging runners as they finished and saying things like, "Don't these runners make it look easy?" I may have shouted back at them, "It's easy because it's short." I know a number of runners did something similar to what I did and found ways to make up the mileage. One friend ran back and forth on the course a hundred yards at a time until his watch lined up with the mile markers. Another friend ran the hilly 1.2 mile section we skipped, and actually ended up nearly a half mile long. Other runners probably found other solutions. In short, it was a mess. The majority of the runners probably didn't do anything, and just finished the course at 11.9 miles. Thus, the official results are almost meaningless, as it's impossible to know how far any given runner ran.
In the last few races I've done, I've won an age group award (always second place) and this race was a better showing than my previous races. I placed 5th in my age group - but if I'd run the 11.9 mile course, I would have finished about 8 minutes earlier, which would have moved me from 40th to 16th overall, and up to 2nd in my age group. But again, it's impossible to know who ran what distance. I'm going to check the race photos when they are available to see who I can recognize that finished in the top 50, and whether I remember them being ahead or behind me.
All in all, it leaves a bit of a bitter taste in my mouth for a race that really was phenomenally executed. My ability to judge my abilities has still not improved, and I ran at a pace that I didn't think was possible. Oh, and I'm sore like I've never been sore before after a run - so I must be doing something right? I know that age group awards aren't why I run races, and I often say that no matter what speed you run at there's always someone faster, and there's always someone slower. So I'll work on keeping my pride in check and accepting that I ran a good race whether anyone can tell or not.
