Persistence wins out

After years of running and countless races of every conceivable length, I have finally found the magic formula for winning.

Age + persistence = 1st

Out of the blue a couple of weeks ago I decided to enter a 10k this weekend. Don't know why, other than I had trained myself for one without really meaning to, so I decided to put the effort to use.

This was the second or third year for this event and as such the field was probably only about 1,000 people for bot the 5 and 10 k races. I think there were more people entered in the shorter race.

Where's the 10k turn?

As luck would have it, race day turned out to be the coldest day of the fall: it was about 24 with a light breeze at race time. I was wearing 4 layers of shirts (finished with a sweatshirt), ear protectors, a stocking cap, highly insulated running gloves with hand warmers inserted, thermal tights and double-thick cold weather running socks.

It was piercingly cold just waiting around for the race to start, so I sat in the car until 7:50, then ran slowly until the gun went off. Everything on me had warmed up by the end of the first mile but my face, and it was going numb, which was a blessing.

I went too fast in the first 5k, but because of the weather I felt pretty energetic and didn't worry about it. I just kind of regulated my pace the rest of the way.

The course was a single loop for the 5k runners, and a second loop over the same route for the 10k runners. You just had to peel off about a 10th of a mile before the finish of the 5k to continue on to the 10k.

Well, I missed the peel-off point and actually finished the 5k, crossing the finish line in 26:02. I had to stop and ask a couple of people where the turnoff was for the 10k, then run back there and resume my race.

The 10k finish

I ran a little harder for a while to kind of catch up, and then felt the need to walk for 45 seconds at the end of mile 5. I can't say I finished real strong because of my poor tactics, but I did cross the line in 53:09. The time would have been about 1 minute quicker had I not taken my detour.

As it turned out, that didn't matter much, because I still took first place in my division, beating the only other guy. I don't know yet how close we were together, since the results aren't on line yet.

So that's what I mean by age and persistence: if you keep running into your senior years, most of your competition is retired, at least from competing.

Since this was the first time I've ever placed, I felt I had to wait around for the awards. It was brutally cold standing around out there with wet clothes, but I hung around long enough to hear the winning time in my division for the 5k. It didn't count, but I won that race, too. They had some kind of glitch with the 10k results, so they eventually just bypassed the announcements and let us pick up our medals. I was glad to get out of there. It was so cold I was beginning to think it was a lot easier to finish out of the money. At least then you can just finish and go home. I guess I won't have to worry about that very often.