The Best Laid Plans...

I love to plan things out.  I like to know what to expect and figure out what I’m going to do before it even happens.  I want to kmow where the obstacles are and how to get around them even if I never crash into them.  So that’s why I’m so surprised at my plan for today’s race.  I have no idea what I want to do.

Today is the Scotland Run 10K with New York Road Runners.  This will be my second race of the season and also my second qualifier of the 9 that I need to gain entry into the 2015 NY Marathon.  Lots of runners take the themes of these very seriously, so all around me are guys dressed in kilts, shivering at the breeze they’re not used to getting up their legs on this cold day. 

As I giggle a little to myself at the site of so many men – let’s call it what it is – in drag, I think a bit about this race.  I have run this race several years in a row, so I know it well.  Last year I ran it with my friend Stephanie, and it was awful.  No, Stephanie is great.  She wasn’t the problem.  Last year I was running on a broken foot that had been MRI’d (hey, if BTW and LOL are words, than so is MRI’d) but not yet diagnosed and this was the most painful run I have ever done.  Today I was standing on two perfectly functional feet, but I was still feeling very unsure.  I didn’t think I was going to get injured again, but I just didn’t have a plan.  Did I want to try to make this my best 10K ever (which is called a PR and is a perfectly normal word to any runner)?  Did I want to go easy and just get through the race?

Before I could hash out an intelligent scheme, the crowd started to move and I was swept across the start line.  I started my watch and I just began running.  Usually I’m out to beat my own time, so I dart in and out of people in order to pass them.  But I didn’t have a plan, so I just ran.  If someone was slower than me, I passed them.  If they were faster, I didn’t fight to keep up.  I ran.  Lately I’ve been in the 10 minute mile range, so I did some math and figured I’d be done in 1 hour and 2 minutes.

At mile 1 my watch beeped to tell me my pace, and I was surprised.  It said “9:39”, quite a bit faster than I felt like I was running.  It was in the high 30s that day and I had started the race with numb feet, so I thought maybe I just couldn’t really feel how fast I was going.  I felt awful, but I always do for the first mile, so I just kept going.

I ran some more, and kept doing what I was doing.  Running.  Nothing more, nothing less.  Well, that’s not exactly true.  Right now I have a monster of a cold that has made breathing out of my nose or hearing out of my ears practically impossible for the last couple days.  And did you ever realize that to swallow, you need to close your mouth?  And have you ever tried swallowing in a middle of a race when you’re breathing hard but your nose is stuffed and useless, so every time you try to swallow you have to close your mouth and you feel like you’re choking?  Yeah, so I was concentrating on that.

I kept running (and trying to swallow and breathe without choking), and suddenly my watch beeped again.  Mile 2 was complete, this time in 9:16.  Huh.  So with no plan at all and a mild respiratory problem, I ran this mile even faster.  Interesting.

The race continued on.  Mile 3 was over the Harlem Hills, so for that one I figured I was going to slow down.  Nope.  9:02.  Was my watch tracking someone else?  The only reason why I knew that it wasn’t (other than that it was on my wrist) was that I felt like hell. I don’t know if was from the cold, or running faster than I’ve been training, but it was horrible.  I thought about stopping twice, but my damned bag was back at the start, and I had to get back there anyway.  So, I trudged on.

Scotland Run, 2011

Mile 4 was more my style at a pace of 9:59.  But when I finished mile 5 in 9 minutes and 34 seconds, it dawned on me that I was doing well and might actually be able to PR (which remember in my world is a word).  So, I planned on going faster for mile 6, and actually didn’t with a time of 9:44, but I had stayed under my 10 minute pace this entire time.

With 0.2 miles left, my brain wanted to run faster and my legs agreed, but my respiratory system was staging a mutiny, so I made staying conscious a priority over moving fast.  I kept going, and finally saw the finish line.  Normally I start to sprint once I can see it, but I couldn’t really breathe and I didn’t think that sprinting was going to help my situation. 

I crossed the finish line and stopped my watch at 1:00:33.  At first I was annoyed that I wasn’t a mere 34 seconds faster, but it’s hard to be mad at yourself for missing a goal that you don’t create until after the race is over.

NY Road Runners stores results forever, so I looked back.  I’ve run 14 10Ks in my career.  This was my 4^th best time of all of them.  It wasn’t a PR, but for a girl without a plan it all worked out pretty well (once I could breathe normally again and swallow without choking myself).  Maybe sometimes the best plans are the ones we don’t have.