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| A classic image of Netter's entitled "Angina Pectoris", frequently seen in med school. Especially if said med school was in Michigan. As in real people walking out of restaurants. Not necessarily in textbooks. |
They'd promised that LA was essentially a downhill run, and they lied - that mutha was hilly, only in that slow, painful way that never seemed to stop. They promised that Long Beach, being at sea level, was essentially flat, and that since the half is almost entirely at the beach, it had even fewer elevation changes - we'd see. But with the hope that the promise of levelness would outweigh my dietary indiscretions (note photo above), I signed up for the Long Beach Half, bib number 13,991, which, coincidentally, also was my expected finishing rank.
I went with my running buddy, Nicole - well, "running buddy" in the sense that we talked about it a lot and since she's a mother of three and also a full-time nursing student whose husband would like to see her on occasion as well, and I had... a lot of not-running going on, we never actually got to run together. My saintly wife drove us to downtown Long Beach (I often tell my wife that she's lucky because I don't enjoy watching team sports and therefore don't spend any time doing so, which in any other marriage might win me a gajillion points, only it's offset by the fact that she woke up at 5:30 am to drive me down to a footrace and then not only waited around for two and a half hours but also went to two different locations to cheer me on) (boy, when I put it like that...) where we alighted from the car like junior high schoolers at the mall and followed the crowds to the starting line.
A quick way to understand what a "thronging crowd" looks like is to wait around for the start of one of these big races. It's different from a mob, I've seen one or two of those and they're scary as hell, and it's not that a thronging crowd is exactly unintimidating, but to hear the buzz and activity, smelling the sweat and random farting, you finally understand how a crowd can throng (perhaps I could write a "throng song" to explain).
Everyone's largely good natured, particularly at the back of the pack. The runners are supposed to sort themselves into waves according to the time in which they think they're going to finish, and I suppose the positive view of things is that it's encouraging to see so many optimists together in one place. If the meaning of that sentence was unclear, I mean to say that a lot of slooooow people pack themselves in at the front of the line, slowing down the people who are at times considerably faster. Which I realized when I kept leaping from side to side and swerving through the crowd in order to pass all of the runners in front of me who were, improbably, even slower than I.
As a matter of fact, I kept passing people the entire way, which was really unusual. I was happiest about my form, which seems to have lasted through the past 7 months of indolence, and perhaps even improved in efficiency, a quick, easy cadence, bouncing off the midfoot, arms up at my side, little wasted movement, actually, if I were less efficient I might be able to burn off more calories, but whatever.
Thirteen point one is, don't get me wrong, a long distance, but it's a lot less, about half I'd say, of 26.2, and I didn't weigh myself down carrying a bunch of gels and didn't worry about the need to aggressively hydrate, I just kept moving forward, one foot on the ground. As opposed to one's self on the ground - I saw at least five people take tumbles on the road, young, otherwise healthy looking people, it was really odd, and I'm not sure if the accidents were attributable to klutziness, poor road conditions, just plain bad luck, or perhaps a combination of all of the above, but I've never seen so many people fall. It was nice seeing so many of their fellow runners spring to the aid of these fallen runners, so quickly that I didn't even have the chance to lope over and begin the entire awkward, "okay, so, well, I guess I'm a doctor and it looks like you just took a spill"-thing, plus the whole I'll-bill-your-insurance thing gets everyone so worked up.
There's always a point in a long run where I'll ask myself, why exactly am I doing this thing? Sometimes it's when I'm pressing the "send" button when I'm registering for a race online, today it was at about mile 11, and sometimes it's both. And the reason, of course, and as with most of the things that I do, it's so I can eat another slices of pizzas, or drink another beers or four (I burnt 1,616 calories during the run - yes, I will have another basket of fries, thank you). And then there's the entire sense of accomplishment, feeling of well-being, euphoric flood of joy around mile 8, etc. etc. But the pizza, that's what makes it all worth while.
Ill-trained, but I still did okay, at least earlier on when I was dodging and weaving around slower runners (all of that extra lateral motion added 0.2 miles to my run - my GPS recorded a 13.3 miler), but I felt the cumulative inactivity of the past 7 months start to drag on my calves towards the end. The very last stretch, the last 0.2, was a blessed downhill, a smile breaking on my sweaty face, and then the run was over. I suppose, over the coming months, that I could put down the cheeseburger and try to find the time to put in some more training, and I do believe I'll try, especially so I can work on keeping my pace even. But like the blog says, I'm Positively Split...
Long Beach Half Marathon
13.3 miles. 1hr:53min:30sec. 8:32 pace.
1,616 calories.
