Ooof!

Georgetown to Idaho Springs Half Marathon Race Report
Let’s play a little game where you guess why this race report is getting posted so late. Is it:

a) Because I suck.
b) Because it is deftly written prose with many clever turns of phrase and witty observations and it takes time to craft such beauty in writing.
c) Because I posted a new Personal Worst.
d) Because I don’t want to talk about it.
e) Because I was keeping you in suspense to build up my page views.
f) Because the first race report I wrote was so whiny and unbearably depressing to read that I just outright deleted it and had to start over.
g) All of the above.

If you took the easy way out and answered g) All of the above, then you’re wrong because b) clearly isn’t true. The correct answer is actually secret answer h) which is ‘all of the above except for b).’

Yes, it’s true. I put the ‘race’ in disgrace and managed to post a new Personal Worst! My time was 2:04:33 (9:31 pace). I won’t waste your time with excuses and explanations about why I failed spectacularly because I don’t really have any. The weather was just about perfect, the course was great, and I didn’t do anything stupid the night before. The only thing I can think of is that I had this Detour Runner bar that I was saving for my pre-race breakfast, but Candis ate it a couple of days prior to the race. I don’t even think she was running at the time, she just did it to spite me so I ended up eating plain old toast instead. Hence, the new PW.

There are a number of frustrating things about this new low, the first of which is that I’m not even sure I can put my finger on what went wrong. Somewhere around mile 8 or 9 my legs started getting really stiff and I just couldn’t keep them going at my desired pace. I even tried envisioning Kara Goucher, who is undefeated at the half marathon distance, but all that did was make other things stiff and further hinder my running. Perhaps I should have envisioned her running?

The second thing that is frustrating about this recent crapping of the bed is that it clearly signals that I have managed to get slower this year. (Perhaps you would expect nothing less from a site named Half-Fast.) This year I have run a 10K, a 5K and now a half marathon at slower pace than I ran them last year. One slow result is a bad day, two are an uncanny coincidence but three bad races in a year are a stinging belly flop into the realization that I’m slower. Join me won’t you? The water’s warm. I’m taking failure to all new levels and I can’t even argue that these results were due to tough courses because the 10K and the half that I ran this year were on the same courses where I PR’d last year. It’s like I have no excuse (except for that breakfast bar thing, I’m holding on to that one), I’m just slower. Fortunately I continue to get handsomer and handsomer with age so I’ve still got that going for me.

I’ll wrap up this race report here because I can feel it starting to head the same way the first attempt went (which is straight to the bottom of the nearest bottle) and I really am far too lazy to write it up a third time.