This year, I was fortunate enough that my camping weekend did not land on the Midsummer Nights Run event (August 21, 2010) . I've been wanting to participate in this event for the last 2 years simply because I've never had the chance to do a night time run :) Just the idea of running in the dark with headlights on made me curious enough to register for it.
I got more than I asked for!
The race started, and chilled as I was from the constant sprinkle of rain, I had a sweat shirt on as I ran. The first time having been a part of a race without team members, I kept reminding myself in my head to keep my own pace, nice and steady, like my previous coaches have always said: don't be affected by others pacing. Nice and steady... or not.
Somehow, I pushed myself to match up to a much quicker pace than my usual. I stayed on that pacing for nearly 3km in... a terrible idea. I started to run out of breath, and needed more time for recovery. Soon enough others that were behind me caught up and went ahead. I wasn't deterred from that, but I was pretty frustrated that I let myself fall into the pacing trap.
Accepting that I'd already messed things up a little bit, I controlled my pacing more carefully. There was a point where I was running alongside this other woman, who like me, was doing a shorter interval than the usual 10 minutes. One moment I was ahead of her and as I stopped to take my interval break, she would run ahead of me. After she stopped, my rest period ended and I ran head of her. We continued on this pattern for a few kilometres until finally I felt the perfect pacing, and I kept on this for the remainding 18km, doing between 9/10 minute intervals. I lost sight of her after that.
It was around 9pm when the rain really started to pour. In fact, it was like the sky just opened up and decided to flood the streets of Toronto with water. This made my last half-hour of running a pure running hell. I had slipped on my sweatshirt again after the sun had gone down, and I could feel the chill in the air again. But even with my sweatshirt I could do little to deal with the crazy downpour. As I ran on the street, there was no way to avoid the puddles. I just stepped right into them, feeling the water soak into my running shoes. I had a cap on, my music on low, my cramp in my left leg throbbing slightly, sweaty, drenched, tired...
At long last, I made it to the finish line, Like a beacon it glowed in the night. I ran towards it, they gave me a waterbottle and hung something around my neck. At first I didn't even register any of it. I was just glad to be done and have someone put an umbrella over my head.
I checked out my time on the finish line; not too bad (considering that my training had gone downhill after coming back from my hiking event), could have been better: 4.26 minutes :)
I guess next on my list would be get back into training more consistantly. Wish me luck on that :P
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