Sly Fox 10k Race Report

After deciding that long races are stupid, I ran the Sly Fox 10k last Saturday. Last year, I ran the Sly Fox Half Marathon, which was a fiasco as they messed up the course and left it about 1.2 miles short. I figured they wouldn't make the same mistake twice (and they didn't) so I signed up for the 10k this year.

Running this year hasn't been going nearly so well as last year. My mileage is down about 30% due to a mixture of illness, work, cold and malaise. Specifically over the last month I've either had a cold that just won't go away but keeps flaring up again once a week, or I've had 4 different colds. It's hard to tell. By race day I was still quite congested, but mostly felt fine. The weather turned out to be excellent: low 40s, clear and a slight breeze. After much wavering back and forth, I settled on running in just shorts and a short sleeve shirt. I did a half mile warm-up and headed for the starting line.

This is a fairly small race. Last year there were about 100 men and 200 women that did the 10k. It's also not a fast race. If the results online are to be trusted, the 10k winner last year ran it in 44 minutes. Even with a cold, I can beat 44 minutes. So I weaved my way through every single person in the starting area and put myself on the very front row. It felt pretty weird. They fired the gun and we took off. It's been 4 years since I've run a 10k. Every distance has it's own challenges, but I think for the 10k it's the fact that you have to run hard from the very beginning, but it's still a long-ish race. In a half marathon you get to start out easy enough that the first few miles are fun. Not so in a 10k. We took off and I was in 2nd place! For about 50 yards. After a quarter mile or so I had slid back to 5th. First place took off like a rocket; he either didn't know what he was doing and would crash hard after a mile or two or he knew exactly what he was doing and was going to crush us all. (It was the latter. 33:30 - wow!) The other three people in front of me seemed a little more reasonable, but 2nd and 3rd gradually pulled away over the first mile or two until I lost sight of them most of the time. Maybe on a better day or after a better month I could have stayed with them, but not today.

The race starts with a half mile of moderate uphill. Not steep or anything, but enough to get your heart rate up immediately. Then it flattens out until about 1.5 miles in. At that point we made it to the turn that was missed in the race last year. It turns out whoever started us lemmings on the wrong route last year might have known what they were doing, because the hills! Oh! The hills! They weren't long, but they were steep. 50 or 100 yards up, then back down, then back up again. It's lovely if you live on the street and drive on it. Not as easy to race up and down as it gently curves left and right as well. At the 2 mile mark I was roughly where I wanted to be at about 13:40 (6:50/mi). The turn around point was at the top of the longest climb of the race. Google tells me that it's not more than a quarter mile, but it felt much longer. I hit the midway point at 21:30. I was hoping for a 42 minute finish, so I was a full minute behind pace, but I didn't feel too bad about that. I didn't think that I could make up the whole minute on the second half, but given how bad those hills felt going up, I though I should be able to make up some of that on the way back.

I noted that the leader passed me on the way back at about the 19:00 mark. I didn't check the time on 2nd and 3rd place, but they were a few hundred yards ahead of me. I didn't need to check the time on 4th place though, because he was right in front of me. He had a lead of 30 yards or so, and throughout the whole race, that lead just wouldn't budge. I might close it by a little bit, but then it seemed like any ground I'd made up would be gone again. He couldn't lose me, and I couldn't catch up. At the speed we were running, 20 to 40 yards is a gap of 5 to 10 seconds.

The second half of the race didn't seem to feature nearly as much downhill as the first half had uphill. This must have been the route that all our parents walked to school through the snow, back in the day. Slowly, ever so slowly, I started to claw back some distance on 4th place. I saw him check back a few times during the race to see where I was. (I checked a few times behind me, but mostly couldn't see anyone back there.) I've rarely been in a situation where I'm trying to specifically pass someone at the end of a race, so I don't have a lot of experience at this, but I knew that the final quarter mile was a nice downhill so I gave it all I had and hoped to out kick him to the finish line. So I kicked, and I kicked hard, but no matter how fast I ran, I was barely closing on him at all and from behind it looked like he was just cruising along like he had been the whole race. In the end, he beat me by 2 seconds. A spectator (volunteer?) afterwards told me that she thought I'd catch him for sure, but it wasn't to be, apparently.

In the end, I don't feel too badly about how I ran. I finished in 42:58 (6:56/mi), 5th place over all (out of 268), 5th place among men (out of 90), and 1st in my age group (6 minutes ahead of 2nd, though 1st and 2nd overall were in my AG, too). It's also a 10 second PR for me, though it's still slower than the pace I did the half marathon at last year (assuming that the distance for the race was accurate [the people running with me with their fancy watches were in general agreement that we ran the full 13.1]). My goal for the summer remains to do a few more 10k's and try and get my time down to an even 40:00. I think that's a very ambitious goal, so we'll just have to see how it goes. I don't have the next 10k picked out yet. I don't have any pictures from the race because Julia was sick so the girls all stayed home, but here's my swag.

(Yes, it's a finisher's medal for a 10k, which I abhor, but I'm pretending it's an AG award, since what I really got was a gift card to a running store.)

Book Heap

My house is a book heap. I'm not sure if I'm bragging or complaining. Maybe one of these days I'll take some pictures of what it looks like at our house when the books start to get out of hand. Books on the dinner table, books on the chairs, on the desk, and on the stairs. Books on the beds, book on the floors, books in the bathroom, books on the couch. It's a bit much sometimes. Our house very literally reminds me of a children's book we have titled "Books, Books, Everywhere". Actually, we have two copies, because of course we do. Anyway, recently I've read . . .

Frozen in Time by Mitchell Zuckoff
Last year I read "Lost in Shangri-La" wherein Zuckoff writes about a WWII plane that crashes in New Guinea and they have to go rescue them. In this book, a WWII plane crashes in Greenland, and they have to go rescue them. Actually, a plane crashes in Greenland so they send planes out searching for them and one of those planes crashes. So then they have to go rescue those guys, by, of course, sending out a plane to get them, which, of course, crashes. If you ever go back in time, don't try to fly over Greenland in the 1940s. Some of the people from crash #2 end up spending about half a year stranded on Greenland waiting to be rescued as attempt after attempt to go get them fails. The book also covers the present day attempts to go and located plane #3. The book was quite engaging, though I'm now ready for a break from books about rescuing people from plane crashes.

The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett
This is the first of the Disc World series. I didn't really enjoy this book much, it was just too silly. This is a fantasy series (41 books thus far!) with your standard medieval level technology, plus magic. But, in what must have started out as a late night "what would happen if . . . " sort of conversation, it's set on a world that is a flat disk. You can walk off the edge. The main characters are a failed magician, and the worlds first tourist, who has come from a far off land, and is both fabulously naive and wealthy. Adventures ensue. At times it's funny, but sometimes it feels overly silly, when indestructible walking luggage arrives on the scene, or when gods playing a game of dice make terrible monsters appear and disappear at random. I don't anticipate reading any more of the books.

Saturn Run by John Sandford and Ctein
First off, is that a name up there in the by line? Yes. The book is written by John Sandford, an author, and Ctein who is a photographer who happens to have degrees from Caltech in English and Physics. You know, as one does. Anyway, if you liked The Martian you should read this book. Or, at least, that's what the email from the library with book suggestions said. The premise behind the book is that some sort of alien object is spotted out around Saturn, and the US and Chinese are racing to get there and discover it first. There's lots of science and engineering in the book, and some action, though I was thankful that it didn't turn in to a "Mission Impossible: In Space" type of plot. It's worth reading, particularly if you've ever thought that most of your novels don't spend enough time discussing orbits and different types of space propulsion systems.

The Pig Did It by Joseph Caldwell
Shannon and I had some time to kill in the library, so we were laughing at the titles of terrible romance novels, when we walked by a book titled "The Pig Did It". Based on the title alone I decided to read the book. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't great either. The main character, an author himself, decides to go spend some time with his aunt in Ireland so can walk along the beaches under grey skies and properly mourn over a recent failure in romance. Of course, a pig gets in the way, and then there's a corpse, and well, he never gets to spend much time brooding like he wants to. But this makes the book sound more action packed than it is. It's a lot of description and introspection and was kinda boring.

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince by JK Rowling
We're nearly done reading the series aloud as a family. Of course, over spring break Julia decided to re-read the first 4 books. Took her 2 days. We have a bit of a tradition where I find a way to slip Harry's death in to every chapter. Of course, the girls are expecting it now. We've recently started book 7. Lets just say this is a trick that I've been building up to for about half a year now . . . .

Furies of Calderon by Jim Butcher
Let's see . . . fantasy novel . . . medieval technology . . . people with one of 4 or 5 kinds of magic powers . . . big empire facing revolution . . . young orphan boy growing up way out in the middle of no where who just happens to live right where all the action is starting to happen. Yeah, this hits all the standard features of the genre. But then, the young boy, who just happens to be the only person with absolutely NO magic powers turns out to . . . wait for it . . . still not have any magic powers. It's actually one of the more redeeming points of the book, because while an obvious way to be original, it actually is original. Anyway, its the first in a series that I will keep reading, because I find the characters interesting enough.

The Rithmatist by Brandon Sanderson
A year or two ago I got all self righteous about the extreme proliferation of YA novels that people read. At times, it seems as though many adults I know only read books written for teenagers. One casualty of this bibliozealotry was The Rithmatist. But you know what? Sanderson is an excellent writer, so you should just read everything he writes regardless of what category they put it in at the library. Don't make the same mistake I did. Sadly, he seems to be trying to set a record for the greatest number of different series that can be in progress at once, and apparently he can only write a limited number of books per year. Oh well.

My Hat

A year ago, we went to Washington DC and surrounding areas. Everyone in our family was allotted one souvenir for the trip. Shannon got a cameo necklace at Gettysburg on the first day. The girls opted for stuffed pandas from the National Zoo on day 4. But even through all the gift shops we walked through, I couldn't find a souvenir that met my high standards. Eventually, we made it to the 6th and final day of the trip, in our 6th state that week and at our last stop of the day: the headquarters of the Appalachian Trail. And there, I finally found my souvenir - an AT hat.

I was due for a new hat, and there it was with its white blaze on the front, which is how the 2,000+ mile Appalachian trail is marked on its run from Georgia to Maine. So I happily bought the had (and a key chain) and our trip was complete.

When our recent trip to Disneyland came up I packed my hat and wore it each day at the park. That is, I wore it until the morning of the last day in the park, when the final moments of my hat were captured on film:

Fractions of a second after this picture was taken, my hat went flying off, forever lost in the brier patch. After dutifully stowing backpacks, hats and sunglasses (not only for myself but for the girls also) for more than two days, I never considered the hat on my head as we climbed on that ride, and it was gone in the blink of an eye, gone to a watery grave in the Splash Mountain water filtration system.

I went back a few times during the day to see if my hat turned up at Splash Mountain, but without luck. We checked the park lost and found on our way out at the end of the day, but they gave me a business card with instructions to call back the next day. I waited 5 days before calling and gave them what has to be one of the more detailed descriptions of a lost hat that they've ever had. They went and looked - no hat. I left my contact information, but they pretty well admitted that if it hadn't turned up after 5 days, the odds were against me.

Shannon, being an excellent wife, got on line and ordered me a new hat (1400 miles of driving not required) which arrived a few days later:

But, of course, as soon as she did that, Disneyland called to let me know that my hat had turned up! Who knows where it had been for 9 days, but it doesn't matter, that which was lost is found.

So now I have two of my favorite hat. A brand new one, and a broken in, wrinkly version that shows some oxidation on the metal on the back from spending some time in the water.

As a side note, it took a lot of searching, but we finally found something free at Disneyland! They pay for the shipping to send stuff back to you! Given what airlines charge these days, I think next time we go, I'll "lose" my entire suitcase at Disneyland and save myself some checked baggage fees.