I wanted to wait until all the Boston reports were given their proper time to shine before I stepped into the light, so forgive the long delay between race-day and this report making it out of my head, and onto your screen.

I had signed up for the UNITE Half Marathon less than a week after the Philadelphia Marathon back in November.  I was still a bit sore, still nursing the traditional post-marathon cold, but this race was 5 months away:  Things would have to get better, wouldn’t they?  2009 had been nothing but missed workouts, work stress, and the usual travails of raising a toddler.  In other words, I was a passenger.  Signing up for this race was my way to say, “Oh, yeah?  Yeah?  You won’t have me to push around anymore, life. I’m signing up, I’m getting a coach, I’m training, and I’m going to run a PR there.  You just watch me!”

Yeah, well, not so much.  Life took on my challenge, reached across the dashboard, and nonchalantly turned the stress-wick up to 11.  January through April for me was even worse than all of 2009 – things had upgraded to industrial strength suck before my very eyes.  I could barely manage 2-3 workouts a week, and when I did get outside or down to the gym, I was so wiped out I could barely manage to do anything one could consider “decent.”

So after filling the training log with more excuses than miles, more misses than hits, and more whine than Julio Gallo’s basement (wait for it…wait for it…okay, move on), April arrived.  Coach Debi hadn’t given up on me, and had done her best to give me things to do with what little time I could create.  Less than a week before race-day, I found out I would have a job for at least one more year.  Out of nine people on my current team at work, two would be retained – I was one of the two.  That was one tremendous weight I wouldn’t have to carry – at least I was pretty much back to just carrying myself.  This was still semi-tremendous at 190 pounds, but that was pretty much where I’d been in November for Philly.

Joining me on this absurd adventure into undertrained bliss would be the usual suspects:  Dave Decker, Brian “Leeeeeroy” Gatens, and Greg Bassett.  Joe Hellenbrand would be playing the part of himself (well ahead of the rest of us), Eric Weiss would be played by an empty chair, and Iliana Dmitriova would be played by a GPS wandering around a field somewhere at Rutgers University.

Speaking of wandering, let’s pick up the story on Saturday.  I had already practiced with the US Dragon Boat team on Saturday AM, so the drive up to Rutgers on Saturday was done with the seat heater set to “Physical Therapy” the entire way.  The plan called for an easy 30-minute run with some pickups, so of course I asked Dave Decker if he’d be interested.

This is akin to asking Amy Winehouse if she’d like something from behind the bar.  Before you know it, all the bottles are empty, and she’s sitting there next to you eating the Potpourri, asking if she can smoke the upholstery while you fix something to eat.  David is a running junkie, and cannot say no.  We decided to figure out how to run to the start the next morning, and kill two birds with one stone.  We had a map, and according to the map, the start would be 1.5 miles away.

How we ended up on the shoulder of New Jersey State Highway 18, 45 minutes into our 30 minute run, is a mystery to me.  Actually, wait, no it isn’t.  We left the hotel, turned right, and within a ½ mile of starting our run, I’m pretty sure we were ¾ of a mile off course, and it only got weirder from there.  We could see the footpath we were supposed to be on, and kept zigging and zagging below it.  We climbed up to the Rutgers Football Stadium, eventually found the Start Line, and then tried to find our way back to the hotel.  When we missed the footpath entrance (which in hindsight, was marked with hard to spot purple and white flags), we ended up on the entrance ramp to Highway 18.  David remarked, “Ahh, that’s a 4-foot shoulder.  We’ll be fine.”  But then the shoulder disappeared, and David said, “There the path – there!  We just need to hop this Jersey barrier…scramble down this culvert…jump that fence, and we’re good.”

Running With Dave: Just Another Day in Paradise.  But after finishing up our 56-minute, 30-minute run, it was time for dinner.  We took up a table, and the men all ate steak.  I had grilled chicken.  The PaleoMen mocked me, and I took their mocking in stride, because between David and Brian, they’d lost a Gary Coleman.  Brian was down 30 pounds, and David 20.  Greg was already rail thin, and had nothing to lose to start with, so he didn’t count.  But clearly, there was something to the Paleo thing – duly noted.

Race Day arrived – and this time, after a brief 15-minute jog, so did we.  We got in line for one last stop at the little blue boxes, and went over race plans:  Leroy hadn’t run but once since Philly, and was aiming to take his pseudo-Kenyan appearance under 1:40.  David was piling on mileage for Lehigh Valley and the Pocono Marathon, so this would be a 2:0x day for him.  I was somewhere in the middle – I was thinking Leroy, but my legs were painting a different portrait.  If I could go under 1:40 it would be a miracle – 1:42-1:44 seemed more realistic.

I’d run a 5K the weekend before in 22:42.  That meant I was theoretically capable of running a 1:44:48 Half Marathon, if I didn’t race like a dipsh*t.  To that end, Coach Debi had told me, “15 minute run, 30-second walk right from the start, and then run the last 2 miles without a break.”  I had a plan to stick to, regardless of what the watch said.  As we headed towards the start, my watch read 8:28.  I was just about to tell David and Brian what a great job we’d done getting there on time – we had 2 minutes to spare.  Perfect!

Which is why it was so perfectly unfortunate that the race timers were ahead of themselves and yelled “GO!” at 8:28:02, while we were still about 100 yards behind the corrals…and now DFL behind 3,000 runners.

AGH.  Oh, well.  At least now I know I couldn’t possibly go out too fast.

Brian put his elbows into their traditional fighting stance, and went slicing into the crowd.  David disappeared back and to my right.  I did my best to move up, using every space I could find.  I cut left, right, right, left, hand-signaling and waving “Thanks!” whenever someone gave me room.  In a moment of Paris-Roubaix genius, I dove to the left onto this nice, wide-open verge next to the road.  I was so focused on this little 6” wide strip of clear, packed dirt, that I didn’t even notice the dude in the blue, long-sleeve shirt doing the same thing, until I ran into him.  THUD.

Luckily, David didn’t seem to mind too much.  Hey, Bobby!”  I don’t know how he did it.  I still don’t.  I moved past, and just kept on moving up.

Mile 1 was an 8:46, which wasn’t too bad considering how far back we’d been.  I settled down into a rhythm, and just kept moving up.  The weather was perfect – cool, somewhat breezy, but fast.  Mile 2 passed in 8:01, and that was with my first walk break just before the mile marker.  Mile 3 cruised by in 7:34, and just before I arrived at mile 4 I took my second walk break, cruising past the sign with an 8:10.

I immediately learned that I liked the walk-break thing.  15 minutes was a nice, short segment, and 30 seconds of walking really only put me 20 seconds behind whomever was near me.  And more often than not, I’d catch and re-pass them within a minute or two of resuming my stride.  Debi’s only been telling me to try this for the past 5 years, so yeah, I’m a slow learner.

But the miles just ticked on by – 8:03, 8:10, 8:10, 8:08, 7:52, 8:16, and 7:56 to mile 11.  I had passed the 12, 11, 10, and 9-minute per mile pacing groups.  Only the 8-minute pacer remained within reach.  I figured I was about 1 minute behind as we ran in the shadow of the stadium.  If I could find 15 seconds per mile – 7:45’s – I should catch him.  Sharp-eyed readers will note my arithmetic wasn’t so strong, in that (1) 15 x 2 = 30, and, (2) I hadn’t run a 7:40 mile since mile 3.  But hey, it made sense at the time.  Enough lactate makes everything you do look great, like beer goggles being worn backwards.

At the same time somewhere up ahead, Brian was simply flying.  The course had several out and back sections, and twice in the early miles I had a chance to take a good look at his form.  At the first pass, he was nearly 3 minutes ahead.  At the second pass as we approached mile 10, the gap had grown to over 4 minutes.  I knew barring an airstrike, he was gone.  Wings back in Delta Supersonic, running in a steak-fueled, elbow-swinging fury.  This was no surprise, and it was amazing to see that yes – he was going to probably run under 1:40, without training, because he wanted to.

Yes I wanted to catch him and beat him.  Yes I dreamed of picking it up in the last 3 miles and making a pass within sight of the line, but I also knew that to do that, I’d need to lose about 20 pounds myself, train some more (actually, train – period), and since I couldn’t really come up with a plan to make that happen in the last 2 miles, I settled on chasing down the 8-minute pacer instead.

After mile 11 the course entered this park for a long loop, and here was where my race began to strain to the breaking point. The road suddenly felt increasingly uphill, even though it looked flat.  My stride started to get heavier, and heavier.  I could see people just ahead of me, but now I couldn’t reel them in.  I kept waiting for the endless climb in the park to pay us back with a descent, but as we exited the same gate we’d run in, there was no descent.  It was another dreaded M.C. Escher loop – uphill back to the start.

There was less than one mile to go now, but mile 12 had barely been a 7:57.  That wasn’t going to get it done.  I had 1.1 miles left to run, so now it was time to pick it up and see what I could scrape back in those last few minutes.  I managed to pick off a few more folks, but as I’d expected when the race had started, the finish would see me coming in without a miracle.  Still, it was a solid day – right where I thought I’d be.

Mile 13.1 was 8:31 – 7:50 pace.  I crossed the line in 1:45:41, staying that annoying one minute behind the 1:44:48 pacer for the 8-minute mile group.  Dang.

Brian was right there, sitting on a chair, sipping a water.  He’d already stopped sweating, and had cooled off completely.  When I asked him how he’d done, he said, “The clock said 1:40 something.  I just missed it.”  I felt bad, but then I realized he wasn’t wearing a watch.  I reminded him that we’d started a good 2 minutes behind the gun time – and voila!  1:38, just like that.

It was suddenly cold and windy, so we waited a bit for Dave, but being the men that we were at the time (which was to say, underdressed, soaked, and completely chilled now that we were no longer moving), we grabbed our post-race snacks from the finish village, and shuffled off for the hotel.  Following traditional Italian navigation methods, once again we were lost within a ¼ mile of leaving the finish line, even though the hotel was only 1/8^th of a mile away.

By the time Brian and I had figured out where to go, David had finished and walked the right, direct way, meeting us just as we got to the front door.  It’s all about the timing, people.

Regardless of how I felt about my race, in the end, it was a great weekend all around.  Only when I got home and sent the numbers to Coach Debi did I learn that I’d actually run a negative split (hey!), and in her words, “Even undertrained, this means running a 1:45 Half Marathon for you is a no-brainer.”  I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I like that.  I used to turn handsprings when I broke 1:50, but my last 6 Half Marathons have been 1:38, 1:44, 1:42, 1:42, 1:46, and 1:45.  I guess she’s got a point.

So now it’s all about taking this sort of thing and making it last 26.2, somewhat slightly faster.  I would like to think if I actually trained a little bit, that might not be so impossible.

There are 7 months until Philadelphia.  We’ll see.

Hurricane Bob
* Instant Marathoner – Just Add Miles *