On August 12th, I decided to stop in Wilmington,DE for a 5K on my way to meet friends at Sea Isle City, NJ later that evening. I have fond memories of running DE, as I had some of my best races there. I also looked forward to this particular course as it started and ended at Rockford Park. Rockford Park is a nice, large park about 1 1/2 miles from where I used to live in DE. More importantly, it's where I used to take my dog Bailey when she came to visit me. She loved that park. There are no fences and there are always other dogs there to play with. There are so many dogs there in the morning and in the evening that my realtor friend Scott used to call it Doggy Happy Hour.
Anyway, I hadn't run this exact course before (this was actually easier than the old Rockford Park course) but I had run most of this course before. It was pretty flat...in fact probably the flattest course I had run this year other than track races. A storm had just passed thru and had brought the temperatures all the way down to the low 70's. A light rain fell through most of the race, which was fine by me as it had a cooling effect. Other than having to be careful on slippery painted lines in the road, it was all good.
I saw a few guys I used to run with regularly. John Schultz was there in his red shorts (and nothing else) as was Ralph McKinney. John is 71 and still going strong. He pulled away from me early and never looked back, finishing in a time of 31:32. Ralph, who is 64, was suffering an injury (again) and finished behind me with a time of 40:12. The older woman who used to run most races was not there.
I took a lot of walk breaks in this race ( 8 to be precise) but I ran hard when I was running with my heart rate running in the 150's. For the 2nd half of the race I ran beside a father and his 5 year old daughter. I really didnt want her to beat me. They slipped ahead of me with about 1/3 of a mile to go while I took my last walk break. My intention was to get rested enough to have a strong kick over the last 1/4 mile. Unfortunately, a cop working the race foiled my plan. As I started to run again and try to catch up the father and daughter, the officer stepped out in the road and asked me to hold up a minute while he let a couple of cars pass thru the intersection. I had nevre had this happen before. We were in the middle of a race and he asked me to stop for the cars instead of the other way around?! I let out an audible ARGH and ran in place until the 2nd car passed. Then I was off but the damage was done. The girl was a good 100 yards in front of me by that point...too much to make up so late in the race.
As I turned into the park for the last few hundred yards of the race I had another car encounter. This time, a guy drove past the girl working as a marshall and drove on the course AND the wrong way on a one way street. I was running right behind him as he had to drive slowly with runners right in front of him. I yelled out several times "wrong way" bu he just kept driving. Finally, about 100 yards from the finish he realized what was going on and pulled over and then backed up. I lost several seconds because of that knucklehead.
I pushed myself really hard over that 100 yards but I couldnt catch the runners in front of me. It was really starting to rain hard at this point. A couple of steps after I finished I started to wretch but fortunately nothing came up. I went over to the woods for a few minutes just in case I did get sick but everything was fine. I jogged back to the car in my wet clothes and immediately headed off for the beach, where I would get sick the next day while deep sea fishing. But thats another story.
My stats for the race
Time: 36:42
Avg heart rate 143
Max heart rate 159
Calories burned 337
Races completed this year 40
Place in this race 77 out of 89
No comments:
Post a Comment