Did my run this morning. It felt great.
- It was my first organized run. Some organizational notes I liked:
- To start, we were grouped by pace, from 5 minute miles to 11 minute miles. A bit disconcerting: I’ve been running 12 minute miles and having difficulty getting any faster.
- Picking up cups of water from the side of the course was neat.
- The mile markers with chronometers were neat and encouraging, since I was doing better than I expected to.
- People cheering didn’t bother me as much as I thought it would.
- Having other runners around was interesting. It didn’t throw off my pace as much as I thought it would. It was difficult to run around people. I was worried about being in the way of everyone who wanted to pass me.
- Bought some BodyGlide. It helped. No chafing.
- Bought new shoes. So much better than the crappy old ones I had. Bought some socks too. Didn’t want to commit the fashion faux-pas of wearing black socks with white running shoes. Jim & Smooth would have lambasted me.
- Wearing a wicking t-shirt was useful.
- Central Park is beautiful. I spent a lot of my time watching my surroundings. I think I want to do a few more runs there in different seasons.
- Running in the cold doesn’t bother me. Duh. It’s nice to have experimental evidence though.
- Having a good mix on my iPod helped a lot.
- The run itself was surprisingly easy. Didn’t notice any of the purported hills.
- Running outside is so much more fun than inside, and surprisingly, so much easier.
- I didn’t pace myself properly. I waited until about 4.5 miles to speed up. I should have sped up at 4 miles.
- My time was about 53 minutes. I’m ecstatic about this, both the time itself, and the fact that I could have done better.
Edit: 2006-01-09 10:42
My results are up. I did even better than I thought. Salient results reproduced below in case the link ever goes stale.
| Place | 2313 / 2892 |
|---|---|
| Net Time | 51:46 |
| Pace / Mile | 10:21 |
Anything that gets you to stop wearing black socks with shorts (and running shoes) is a good thing (TM). If that thing had to be running, well, so be it…
You failed to mention the critical factors of success: Dina’s runner-friendly meat-lean lasagna dinner, her passionate cheering during the race, and your white headband to keep the sweat away from your eyes.
Sarah: Hmmm… yup… fell through the cracks…
I used to run cross-country, and I don’t think anyone worried about being in someone else’s way. On long runs, people sort themselves by speed fairly quickly, so after the first mile most passing is tired people who overexerted themselves at the beginning falling back. Things generally seem to work so that people are more spread out by the end of the race when people start sprinting.
I noticed when training for cross-country every summer that running is fun once you can run 5 miles without straining too much. Until you get there, running feels awful, but once you get into good enough shape to run 5 miles without feeling like you’re going to die, running becomes fun. Outside running in decent weather is definitely much better than indoor running. There are bridgeloop maps that tell you all the distances if you want to run by the river.
Congratulations on running a race!
[...] Did another run today: Bradford Valentine Run. The doctor said that if I could touch my toes it meant my back was in good enough shape to run. [...]