2016 Frostbite Half Marathon

As I took today's race pretty seriously, I'm writing about it rather than a throwback report this week.

Run January 23, 2016

Of course I knew that grad school was going to kill my competitive running. I stress competitive because one doesn't have to race well to enjoy running. Or, so I'm told. I hope that turns out to be true because today was pretty much the confirming observation that my competitive days are done.

My intention was to run this race as well as possible to get some sense of what pace to run at Woodlands. From my regular workouts, I knew that my fitness had declined since Milwaukee, but it wasn't obvious just how much. Getting the opening pace of a marathon wrong by even a few seconds per mile can be disastrous. I did a mini-taper, taking this week light, particularly Thursday and Friday.

The mile markers at St. Louis Track Events only loosely correlate with the actual distance in miles, so it's never clear really how fast you are running. However, I was pretty sure I was somewhere in the 6:35-6:40 range for the first few miles. That's not where I wanted to be, but the effort felt right, so I went with it, hoping I might find something in the second half.

As the course is a loop, I was able to get a reasonably accurate pace observation at the close of the first lap. It wasn't pretty: 43:30. I tried to pick it up in the second half, but to no avail. It turns out, my pacing was spot on. I was turning myself inside out to hold on to it at the end and wound up with nearly even splits, finishing in a dismal 87:07; my slowest road half since 1996.

Well, shoot. Things are much worse than I had hoped. A sub-3 at The Woodlands isn't looking very likely. There was nothing about today that would indicate the time was a fluke. In fact, if I was used to running halves in around 87 minutes, I'd be patting myself on the back for such a well-metered effort. Unfortunately, to run a sub-3 full, you really need to be running halves around 85. And, as a 52-year-old marathoner, you really need to be running sub-3's to be competitive.

To those who haven't seriously competed, a couple minutes in a 90-minute race that doesn't sound like a big difference, but it certainly is. I'm not quite ready to give up and call The Woodlands a fun  run. After all, I am in the elite field, so I really should give it my best shot even if that's likely to be five or six minutes slower than last year. After that, I am going to acquiesce to reality and really start running just for fun. How fun that will actually be for a type-A like myself remains an open question. But, so is my thesis topic, and that's really where I need to be putting my efforts.