The only other 8K races that I've done have been the hilly loop around Stone Mountain, in the Livvy's Love races each January. My best time for that distance has been 42:04 (2016), although I've covered the 8K / 5 mile distance more quickly in some of my fastest 10K races. Today's race was at the Foxhall Resort, allegedly near Douglasville, but in reality another 15 - 20 minutes drive away from Atlanta, way out in the middle of Nowhere, Georgia. Actually the grounds were very nice. It looked like the kind of place that I might want to come for a very $$$pecial weekend.
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| Beautiful grounds at the Foxhall Resort |
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| The field of play, not a hill in sight, but a little fog over the Chattahoochee in the distance |
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| A beautiful morning to run |
I didn't have any big goals for this race. I had told Coach Carl that I would be conservative in the first mile, jogging an easy 9:30 minute mile, since I didn't have an elevation map for the route, and would then try to speed up if the route allowed. But when I arrived at the start, I saw a flat field next to the Chattahoochee River. I ripped up and threw away the conservative plan. Could I run a 42 minute 8K on a flat course?
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| The 7:30 am heat, ready to start (above), and underway (below) |
Once again I was in the 7:33 am heat. With the blast of an airhorn, a young man took off at breakneck speed (he finished in less than 30 minutes) but I was running second. In the beginning, the path was a gravel road, which was easy to run on, but turned into grass as we made our way parallel to the banks of the river. At an 8:18 min / mile pace, I had certainly run the first mile faster than a conservative jog, but surely I could hold that pace for awhile on that soft forgiving surface, on level terrain.
In the early part of the second mile, I passed someone from an earlier heat, then saw another person up ahead that I aimed to catch. Then we turned into a forest: and up a steep hill! I said to the course monitor "So this is where you hid the hill!" I should have been less accusatory, i.e. "So this is where the hill is hidden!" would have held him blameless. At least I didn't shake a finger at him. I sprinted up the first part of the hill past the next runner while calling out "passing on your left", but midway up, decided to take a short walk break, not wanting to burn myself out too early in the race. There were some tree roots in this section, which someone in the Atlanta Track Club had thoughtfully painted yellow. Nonetheless I picked up my feet deliberately, not wanting to re-create one of my trail racing disasters. I thought we were at the top, but then we took a left turn and started running uphill again. This race was definitely not going according to any plan.
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| Many walk breaks in the second half |
After passing the mile 2 marker (10:10!, any hope for 42 minutes already out of reach), two runners in a later heat passed me in close succession. We reached a switchback, I saw that we would head downhill (yay!!), but was dismayed that the elevation drop was steep enough that I could not run that fast. Around 2.6 miles in, we were finally out of the hills and back onto level ground. Whew, I'm glad that was over! We ran on a gravel road for a few hundred yards, then turned left into a field, on a nice soft surface. But the grass here was a few inches high, and that was not easy! My heart rate spiked, and I had to take another walk break, on level ground. That was really disappointing, but 180 beats per minute was not something that my heart could sustain for long at all. After I had recovered back to 160 bpm, I began running again. I stopped keeping track of how many runners from heats behind me were passing me vs. walkers or slower runners that I was passing. At the 3 mile mark (9:19, 27:47 elapsed), less than two miles to go!
But I still needed to take walk breaks every couple of minutes. I had not imagined that it would be so difficult to run on a grassy field. I tried to follow tire marks from the tractor that had mowed the field not nearly recently enough, but then would kick up brown grass clippings We worked our way around a pond, tall weeds hitting me in the face. I should have brought bug spray. Eventually we made it back onto the gravel road. I tried to pick up some speed, but having maxxed out my heart rate early in the race, it kept rising with any significant increase in effort, so I had to take more walk breaks. The mile 4 sign was at a left turn, returning us into the grassy field, as I passed a walker at that moment. 10:26 for mile 4, 38:13, with almost one full mile to go.
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| I took this photo during my warm-up. Later I realized that the runner in this photo was around 4.5 miles into his race. |
We saw a couple of horses calmly watching the occasional foolish human walk or run by. Then we came over a cute little bridge, and took a right turn toward what looked like, in the distance, the finish line! As we drew closer, my eyes confirmed that the finish line was not a mirage. But then a race volunteer directed us to turn right. That's perpendicular to the finish line! Slogging through the rough, finally turning around to slog back the way that we had come, at around 4.7 miles elapsed, we finally turned for good toward the finish line. Push - push - push - push!!! I could hear the announcer encouraging us to finish strongly. There was no one directly behind me, I could have jogged in, but I was running for my pride, through the finish line with a 9:33 min / mile pace for the final 0.94 miles, 47:15 official.
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| The finish line from a distance |
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| Another finisher crossing a few minutes after I had finished, after I could breathe again. |
I was completely exhausted, breathing heavily. I turned away from the volunteers at the finish line, trying to keep my distance from others while not collapsing onto the ground. Wow, that was terribly difficult. It was less than one-fifth of the distance of a marathon, but from mile 1.5 to the finish, that was a challenging run. Walking back to the car, I needed to stand in the shade of a tree for a long time, before I had recovered enough to safely navigate the hour-drive home.
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| This is what happens when I shred the conservative race plan at the starting line. |
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| On the bright side, I have this really cool Atlanta Track Club mask. |
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