(Pictures coming soon!)
I was thrilled to have Courtney and her boyfriend, Aaron (who just got a residency in Boston at Brigham - his first choice!) in town for the weekend. The three of us spent Saturday walking around the city enjoying the gorgeous weather, and they indulged me by consenting to eat high-carb foods along with me. I drank a giant bottle of Gatorade and lots of water, ate a bagel and a pile of noodles, and by 11:30 was in bed with my race stuff laid out for the next morning. I fell asleep quickly, but woke up at 2:00 A.M. after two back-to-back nightmares that I had missed the start of the race. Yikes.
When I woke up again, it was to my alarm clock playing Queen's "We are the Champions." 5:40 A.M. I drank some more Gatorade (I really hate Gatorade), ate a rice cake with peanut butter and honey, and headed out the door with a tank top and shorts under my warm-up pants and throw-away, $5 fleece. It was still dark.
At the Subway station, I saw several people carrying clear plastic bags to check at the starting line. I asked one middle-aged guy whether he planned to take the crosstown bus or walk across the park – I was a little worried about getting there on time – and we ended up chatting up until we got to the starting area and parted ways. I told him I hoped to make the cut-off time, which I thought was 1:40, so that I wouldn’t have to enter the lottery for the next half-marathon and he looked skeptical and told me that was pretty fast.
He and I ended up taking the bus across Central Park towards the starting line on the east side of it. The bus was full of other runners. One guy about my age told us that 16,000 people were registered to run that day. (!) We arrived at the starting area at 7:05, where I checked my bag, and waited in a very long line to use one of at least 40 portable bathrooms before the race began at 7:30.
In the starting corral, surrounded by goosebumpy arms and trembling knees on all sides (I was glad for my throw-away fleece) I began to get an idea for just how enormous this race was. We were grouped in sections, 1,000 runners in each area, and the line of people stretched farther than I could see both in front of and behind me; my bib number was 8358, putting me right about in the middle of the pack. After a few announcements over a speaker, during which people around me chattered softly, the national anthem played and then I heard "On your marks." I didn't hear anything else, which was ok because it took a few minutes for us to even start walking towards the starting line. After a bit, there was enough room to jog, and by the time I crossed the starting line, 8 minutes and 20 seconds on the official clock had already passed.
There were already a few spectators along the sides, clapping, cheering, and clanging cowbells. The runners were bunched together and running much more slowly than I felt I could be going, but I had trouble weaving in and out of them without crashing into anyone for the first few miles. The sun continued to rise, as did my body temperature. It was 53 degrees. I ditched my fleece somewhere after Mile 2. There were clocks at almost all of the mile markers, which helped me determine whether or not I was meeting my target pace of 9 minutes per mile. Although it seemed that I was going a bit faster than I'd anticipated, I felt good so I didn't slow down, and I couldn't really be sure anyway because I'd lose track of the numbers sometimes between miles. Next time, I will definitely wear a digital watch that can record splits.
I kept myself entertained by people-watching. Fans along the sidelines waved signs, from the generic (Run, Dave, Run! We love you, Mel! Go Daddy! Run Mom! Rock on, Team in Training!) to the humorous (Go Phil! Beer @ finish! Some girls chase boys. Lisa runs past them). One guy had a big sign with a hand painted on it advertising "free high fives." I took one. One middle aged man leapt from the sidelines to run a few steps beside a girl who looked like she might be his daughter. He kissed her on the cheek, said something encouraging, then turned back to the margins. It was fun to watch both fans and runners as they recognized each other. The runners themselves provided lots of diversion as well. One guy had written "Michael's first ½ marathon" on his jersey. I read "Israel," in Hebrew, on the back of another jersey. Lots of people who were running for charity had memorial messages written on their shirts: "In loving memory of Ellen, Dan, and Sarah, my sweet Patrick, my mom."
I continued to feel that I was going faster than I'd planned, and passed people consistently. Although I worried that I wouldn't have enough steam to finish at this pace, but I felt pretty good and my split times, assuming I was calculating them correctly, seemed consistent. My form felt like it was good enough (we'll see about that when I get a look at some pictures later), and nothing was hurting too much, thank goodness. I decided to pause for water once we were out of Central Park.
Coming out of the park was a pretty spectacular thing. Right after Mile 8, the spectators started to yell encouragingly that we were nearly out of the park, and then as I left the last trees behind me and crossed into the street, suddenly there was a huge crowd instead of small straggling groups and the noise level rose to four or five times what it had been. We ran along 7th Avenue. As we crossed 54th Street, we went over a rise and I could see down the gentle slope for maybe a half a mile in front of me. The sheer number of people bouncing along in front of me was staggering. I flipped around and ran a few steps backwards to check out the pack in back of me and decided that I'd better not fall.
I took my first Gatorade break after about 8.5 miles, slowing next to one of the hydration stations for about 15 seconds, just enough time to get in three swallows, before tossing the cup to join the other crushed cups that blanketed the ground and heading off again.
We ran through Times Square. There were bands set up every mile or so. Spectators lined the streets, some waving signs, some standing in front of hotels looking mildly surprised to see all of this going on so early in the morning. Traffic going along one side of 42nd Street, partitioned off with metal fencing, was at a standstill, and many drivers were holding phones out of windows to take pictures.
As we rounded the bend to go along the last stretch parallel to the Hudson, the band set up there announced that they were going to play a song they'd "never played and may never play again" and launched into "Eye of the Tiger." We were approaching Mile 10, and weary runners around me broke into ragged cheers and threw fists into the air. I needed that boost, because the 9th mile was probably the toughest one. As I was leaving another hydration station a little further on, I came up behind my "friend" from the Subway/bus trip. He saw me as I approached. "Hey! Great job!" he said, looking surprised as I blew past him. I felt vindicated.
A terrible thought occurred to me as we ran past the 11-mile marker. "Hey," I gasped to a guy next to me, "does that mean we've done 11, or that we're starting the 11th mile?" "Done eleven," he wheezed back. "Oh thank god," I replied, and a few runners around us laughed. Knowing that there were only two more to go was great, but I was exhausted. At least, I thought, I won't be kicking myself after the race, thinking that I could have given it more. I don't think I could have pushed any harder from the second I crossed the starting line.
I sped up steadily, passed Mile 12, and then after another few minutes of trying to ignore my aching shoulders and burning lungs (I don’t even want to talk about my legs), I saw the 13 mile-marker and then the finish line beyond it. Suppressing the urge to vomit (Mr. Garcia, my beloved high school track coach, always said that if you didn't feel like you were going to throw up, you weren't pushing hard enough), I picked up the pace even more, and the last tenth of a mile was a blur. I sprinted across the finish line and then jerked to a walk. I couldn't believe I was done. The clock above the finish line had said 1:56. I was pretty sure I'd crossed the starting line at 8:20, but I was a bit dizzy and wondered if I could have really finished that fast. I figured that between fatigue and subpar math skills, I must be doing the subtraction wrong; there was no way I'd finished in 1:44.
I took the train home, arrived at 11:00, fell asleep, and finally worked up the energy for a shower around 2:00.
My goal
Total time: Somewhere between 1:57 and 1:58
Minutes per mile: 9
My results
Final time: 1:44:24
Minutes per mile: 7:58
Overall place: 2,416th (that means I beat 13, 584 people!)
Place by gender: 582nd
Place by age: 186th
I enjoyed today more than anything I've done in a while. There's another half in Brooklyn in May, and you'd better believe I'm signing up.
No comments:
Post a Comment