But sadly, no pictures. I really wanted a shot of the Paddy Kelly 5 mile road race headquarters, Harry's Pub at Westgate Lanes. But my camera batteries were dead. Anyway, this is a race report, my fourth Paddy Kelly in the last five years. Last season my foot problem axed the racing and I missed this one. This year, my mysterious sore hip threatened to do the same, but I am determined to do some racing over the winter because I feel like I'm too old to not put in race intensity for an entire winter without permanent loss of my dwindling top end. To that end I've assembled a completely new ensemble of medical professionals, and we're trying to figure out what is wrong and how to fix it. In the meantime, I'm fortunate to have as my team captain an expert on racing while injured, the indomitable Duano, who's advised me that the best approach is to simply not train. Save yourself for race day. And that's pretty much what I've been doing...
Well not completely. In between massage, chiropractor, and doctor's appointments, I've been running short and easy every four days or so. On top of that, I'm killing it in the solobreak February trainer challenge, having not missed a day yet, even coming back and riding the trainer on the (rare) days that I ride outside. But after a thirty hour January (that is a lot for me), February is rest month, and I'm planning on pushing my road season back a month or so from previous years. So my hip wasn't too sore on Saturday, and I decided to do the race. I had no idea what to expect.
The course is in Field's Park, with the start right where the cross race is. The route goes around the entire park, which I know by heart from thousands of bong hit and Haffenreffer-fueled circuits in old Ramblers, Falcons, and Oldsmobiles back in the days when I should have been attending high school. Around 200 club runners lined up for the start. My plan was to take it out slow, try to do the first mile in 6:30, and then take off a few seconds each mile after that. I lined up second row behind a few known suspects in the masters field, and got a very clean start. Habitually running too close to the front, I sat down and did the math before the race. Figuring the leaders would run the first mile in 5:20, and that that's about five meters/second, I'd want to be over 300 meters back by the marker. That's a long way. And when we were almost halfway there, they were still close enough to hit with a well thrown snowball...
Despite feeling surprisingly good, I backed off anyway, and an obvious master from the Framingham club blew by me. The first mile ends just after the only genuine hill on the course, Tower Hill. Despite slowing down, and taking it "easy" on the hill, I got there in 5:58. I just knew this was bad, so I slowed down a lot more, and even still I was hurting a bit during mile two. I think all of it is false flat uphill, but the second split was a 6:17. Mile three starts downhill and I immediately felt great, even though my heart rate was crazy high. Some of the others near me started floundering, and I was keeping it together for a 6:14 split.
Mile four is pretty flat, but there's a short downhill right after it. I ran four in 6:06, with my heart rate in the high 160's, a place where these days I normally blow. The downhill seemed really short. The last mile in this race always feels ridiculously long, and since most of the competitors are seasoned runners who, unlike me, know how to pace, I've traditionally lost a lot of spots here in my previous attempts. This year we were more spread out and I just sucked it up. I thought I was going faster but it took 6:07 and my official finish was 30:38, fifteenth overall and third in the 40-49. This was my second fastest time on this course, a minute slower than my 29:35 pr in 2008, but faster than the two prior years. My hip wasn't really sore during the race but it tightened up a lot afterward. But I got in the race intensity that I wanted, with an average HR of 163 and a max of 173, matching the high number I saw only once during cross season.
If my hip doesn't bounce back and feel great in a few days, then I might bag out on running races for the rest of the spring. That's not my first choice though. We're trying a bunch of stuff to try to improve my running mechanics and hopefully eliminate the root cause of what feels like simple overuse inflammation, but whether or not that will work in the absence of extended rest, well, who knows? The Foxboro 10 miler is next week and I'd really like to be there, even though running as well as I did in 2008 (probably my best running race ever, any distance) just can't happen. Well there's always bike racing... Thanks for reading.
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