That's me looking awesome at the finish.
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This race was called the Hope is Coming 5k, and proceeds will benefit the new cancer hospital being built in downtown New Haven. How could I not support this race? I've been looking forward to it for months. I figure they're going to get my money anyway; I might as well get a t-shirt out of it.
I was a little concerned with this race before it even began. The website was pretty sparse with its information. No directions to the race (easy enough to look them up yourself, but it's kind of an expected courtesy). The site listed a start time, but no time when registration would open or close. No map of the route. Little things, but it made me kind of wary about how the race would be managed. I was, unfortunately, justified in my wariness.
I got there nice and early, about an hour before the race began. My foot has still been hurting lately, so I didn't register beforehand, thinking if I was still hobbling that I'd skip it. But it felt good yesterday, so I gave it a shot today. There were t-shirts for the first 100 people to sign up, so I knew that I had a chance of not getting one by not pre-registering. Unfortunately, I missed out. Which was probably fine, since the t-shirt didn't really mention "cancer" much. In fact, the whole race was kind of cancer-free. I was kind of expecting the whole cancer thing to be a little more prominent.
So, no t-shirt, but I did get a "goody bag" from Runner's World magazine, one of the race sponsors. The "goodies" consisted of one ad from Adidas and another one for sunglasses. I guess no one told the race managers that they were supposed to add stuff to the bags from the other sponsors.
I'd been trying to think, over the last few days, of why I've been having foot problems lately. I decided that it might be my shoes -- the only other time I had a nagging injury, it came just after I changed to a different type of running shoe. When I got new running shoes a couple of months ago, I got the same style, but a half size larger. I know one of the things I'm supposed to do for my foot problem is lace up my shoes tighter, so I figured maybe my problem came from wearing bigger (and thus looser) shoes. So at the last minute, I decided to wear my old, half-size-smaller shoes to this race. Unfortunately, I realized as I was warming up that I had forgotten to switch the extra padded stability inserts from my bigger shoes to my smaller ones. So I was running with less padding. I thought of (lymphoma survivor) Mr. T's response in Rocky III when he was asked to give a prediction for the fight: "Pain." That's what I was predicting for my feet afterwards. (I was unfortunately right about that, too.)
I was actually feeling pretty good before the race, and I though I had a shot at a decent time. The race started at West Haven High School and then ran along a beach road, which was beautiful, but a little busy. There were no real safety measures taken for us. One police officer stopped traffic at the first intersection on the route, but other than that, we were basically running in the road with the beach traffic. Not fun.
I was running about 9:13 at the first mile -- a time I was very pleased about. At a mile and a half, the course veered off to the right, and there came another big problem with the race: the water table was immediately around the corner, at the base of a hill. I did manage to see the table (not everyone did), but spilled my water going uphill. Poor placement. I didn't mind the hill, though; I do well with hills, and passed a bunch of people who were getting tired at that point.
But here's the worst part of things: at the top of the hill, we turned left. A couple of blocks away, we were (apparently) supposed to turn left again, back on to the busy beach road. But I saw a whole bunch of people doubling back, having missed that left turn. As we got closer to the turn, we could see a sign with an arrow pointing to the right, which is where those people who had missed the turn had gone. The sign had been attached to a telephone pole with tape, and the tape had come off the top of the sign, so when it fell, it flipped directions, so the left arrow was now a right arrow. When I saw the problem, I ran across the street and tried to fix the sign, thinking that the people behind me really didn't need to run any longer than necessary. I think it fell again after I ran off.
That detour cost me a few seconds, and a lot of momentum. The people I had passed on the hill were back in front of me now. At the two mile mark, I was running at 9:30 per mile.
I was getting tired by now, and a little disappointed that I was slowing down. The two mile mark is usually when I'm hitting a good stride. I gutted it out, though. I came back to the high school at the three mile mark, running at about 27:55. I knew I had a good shot at breaking 30 minutes, but I'd need to pick it up a little.
I was slowed slightly by a woman in front of me, who tripped over one of the speed bumps on the course. She was OK.
When the clock came into view, I knew I could break 30 easily. I sprinted (or sped up to something approximatinga sprint) as hard as I could and made 29:49, which comes to 9:36 per mile. I haven't seen any results posted online yet. Don't know if I will.
The kids came up to me immediately and asked if I had run the wrong way. Apparently, one of the early finishers said she had a GPS on and it said she had run 3.5 miles, not 3.1. I'd be pretty darn angry if I had a chance at winning and it had been messed up so badly.
I hate to trash the management of a race, but this was legitimately bad. I left pretty soon after I finished, but I heard that the race director apologized to everyone for the problems and promised to do better next year. Still, I think I'm especially disappointed because I felt such a connection to the beneficiary. I have little doubt that I will be at this new cancer hospital at some point, for some reason, and I wanted the race to be more special. Other than a woman wearing a red breast cancer ribbon, I didn't see any sign that this was connected to cancer at all.
But I ran a good race, the weather was great, and the cause was worthwhile. I hope they'll get it right next time. I'm sure they'll get plenty of feedback.
Late addition: Results are in. I came in 78 of 142. Not bad.
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