This is a little late, but that’s OK.
I didn’t have much of a goal in mind for Sunday’s run, and that was further dampened by the unseasonably hot weather. The hottest BSR since my first in 2000, which was a truly awful day of running for me – I wasn’t ready for the distance or the weather. (Four months later, I ran the PDR in less time.) This time, I thought I would be better prepared, solely based on experience. Whoops.
Lots of things went wrong, from the insanely crowded subway ride to the start (my foot was cramping up because I couldn’t stand up very well) to my new watch going nutty (it’s one of those Timex tap watches; I stupidly set the sensitivity too low and it misfired repeatedly, for a total of 39 laps in a 10 mile race, so I have no idea what my splits after Mile 4 were without a lot of guessing).
Thanks to the crummy winter weather, illness, and work, I didn’t have enough time to ramp up my training to where I would have liked it to have been (only one run of 10 miles), so I was a little short on the preparation. I figured I could handle a 7:00 per mile pace. Just enough to keep myself in the second start corral. Until Mile 4, I was hovering around 7:00 per mile. I took water at almost every stop (skipping one of the two right around Mile 5), even if I didn’t really need it. And then, like most of my other on-the-fly BSR plans, it all fell apart around Mile 5. I obviously wasn’t ready for a 7:00 pace. I had to stop to walk twice: once between Miles 6 and 7 and once between Miles 7 and 8. About a block each time, just long enough to catch my breath and get it together again.
You know it’s a bad day when you think about stopping. I did a few times after Mile 6, thinking that it wouldn’t be that bad too take a left turn and head home (a little over a mile east of Broad). But I didn’t think I could have lived with the DNF due to wimping out. I finished in 1:17 and change, my slowest time in years. Not that big a deal considering I was not prepared. I’ll take this as more training and move on to other running over the summer.