Good friends. Good weather. Good race.
Good forum encounter. It all added up to a great weekend!
Wind Runners.....that was the name
of our mixed masters relay team at the 2001 Big Sur Marathon last Sunday. Who were the Wind Runners? Five friends from the
Merv, RW and Old Folks Home running forums.....DeannaV from California, Tim Tanner from Ohio, Muskrat Mary from Germany, El
Contador (Jeff) from California and me from Maryland. This group of mixed masters runners was organized by Deanna on Tim Tanner’s
Old Folks Home forum. We also had a youngster, Kilsa (Kil or Mudpup), from Merv and RW forums as a team “mascot”.
J Actually, Kil came out from Utah to enjoy the weekend with us and possibly run as
a substitute on a team made up of co-workers, but he didn’t get to run.
Deanna and Mary named our team “Wind
Runners” in honor of the new sailboat that Sue and I bought 6 months ago and on which we spent the winter cruising to
Florida from Maryland.
The name of our boat is Wind Runner.
A word about the Big Sur Marathon......spectacular!
It is known as one of the most beautiful marathon courses in the world, and it’s easy to see why. The scenery along
the course is stunning with the mountains meeting the sea.
The course is well known to be beautiful,
but tough. It meanders mostly along the seashore with hills from start to finish....some very long and challenging. The weather
was gorgeous with temps in the 50s all morning, low humidity and a beautiful blue sky. There was a strong headwind blowing
off of the ocean. If I had been running the entire race, I would have wanted less sun and wind. But it was great for relay
running and not too bad for those running the whole 26.2 miles. Each of the 5 relay legs includes lots of hills. But, the
third leg, which Mary ran, was the longest and most hilly, including a 2-mile long steady climb of 500 feet up Hurricane Point.
Each Wind Runner will post his or her
own race report. Since some might not post their reports on this forum, I’ll take the liberty of offering a summary
team report from my perspective. Then, I’ll add my personal report.
Team Report
It’s a bit of a miracle that we
actually managed to run the race as an intact team as originally planned. Deanna, Jeff and Mary have had injuries in the last
few months that kept them from running for extended periods of time. All three have been easing back into running and had
limited training leading up to the race. There was a good chance that one or more of them might have suffered a setback in
the weeks leading up to Big Sur and not have been able to run the race at all, although all three were determined to run come
hell or high water. Tim and I have been healthy, but neither of us has been training very much for several months. Consequently,
both of us are overweight and out of shape.....me more so than him. Except for a half marathon that Mary ran a few weeks ago,
none of us had raced in recent months. As a result of all of our situations, we were probably the most undertrained team in
the race, relative to our true abilities. At dinner Friday night, we estimated
that we would probably run somewhere in the 4:20 range, although something faster might be possible if some of us surprised
ourselves.
We ran better as a team than we
expected. We finished 8th out of 16 in the mixed masters relay team category. (There was a total of about 250 relay teams
entered in various categories.) It wasn’t possible to get precise leg splits because of time spent in transition exchanges
and the lack of precision measurement of leg lengths. However, the race went roughly like this: Jeff got us off to a fast start with a sub-31 minute 4 mile leg. I ran the 5.8 mile second leg in a pedestrian
1:01, which was about as good as I expected to do. Mary blasted the hilly third leg of 6.9 miles in 1:08! Tim ran his usual
solid race on the 4th leg of 5.3 miles. Then, Deanna flew through the final 4.2 miles knowing that she had a chance to get
us under 4 hours with a strong effort.....and brought us in at 3:59:07. It was a solid performance by the Wind Runners that
was made possible because each of us ran at least as well as we had estimated and one, Mary, much faster. Afterwards, we estimated
that, if each of us were properly trained and conditioned, we could run this race about 45-minutes faster, or around 3:15,
which would have placed us second in our category. Maybe we will take that on as a challenge for a future year. J
My
Personal Race Report
The Race: This was the first race I’ve
run in a long, long time in which I really didn’t know what to expect from myself. I can usually confidently predict
my race pace within 5-10 sec/mile. But not this time. I just wasn’t enough in touch with my current level of running
condition. My last race was a 5k eight months ago. I’m 40 pounds overweight. And I had run a total of only 66 miles
all year before this weekend. The only input I had to work with was the pace of 10:30/mile I ran during my last two “easy”
runs of 6 and 8 miles pace two weeks ago....and I had to work fairly hard to do that on flat terrain. The Big
Sur course is anything but flat! My leg was rolling with a couple of significant hills and I haven’t run
hills this serious in years. The best prediction I could come up with was that the “easy” 10:30 pace I ran two
weeks ago might be race pace on these hills with a possibility of running a little faster and a better probability of the
hills forcing something a lot slower. So, I estimated that I might run somewhere between 10-11 minutes/mile and told the team
that I thought I could do my leg in 60-65 minutes. I wound up running 1:01:12 with splits of 10:07, 10:27, 10:48, 11:30, 11:34,
and 6:47 (8:48 pace) for the last 8/10 mile for an average pace of 10:33.
Jeff, who ran a solid first leg, arrived
at the transition area right on predicted schedule. We passed the wrist band in just a couple of seconds and I took off. The
4-mile marker was about 30 yards past our transition point, so I waited until I reached it before starting my watch to get
accurate mile splits. I had driven the course the day before, so I knew what to expect in terms of hills. My leg started with
a slight downhill for a few hundred yards, then settled into a gently rolling first two miles. The third mile started a steady
upgrade climb, still rolling, that increased in mile 4 and became a constant steep climb for most of the fifth mile. The increasingly
difficult terrain, plus the fact that I started a little faster than I should have, is reflected in my splits. Finally, the
last ¾ mile was all downhill to the transition with Mary just short of the 10-mile marker.
My legs felt fine all the way. However,
my cardio-respiratory systems didn’t want to cooperate. (That reflects my lack of training.) And my mental toughness
to push myself when it got difficult, especially up the hills, was lacking. (That reflects my lack of recent racing.) I realized
after the first couple of miles that I was running closer to a 5k than 5.8 mile race effort, so I eased off just a tad. Still,
about 2/3 the way up the very steep, long uphill in my fifth mile, I seriously thought about walking to the top of the hill.
If I had been running just for myself, I might have walked that quarter mile. But I couldn’t do that to the team. Also,
Mary had a much more difficult hill facing her in her first two miles. How could I wimp out when she intended to run her big
hill? Finally, I crested the hill and started down the wonderful downhill to the transition with Mary. I let my stride stretch
out and just went with the flow. Man, I do love running downhill! I found Mary amid the mass of 3rd leg runners waiting for
their teammates to show up, passed the wrist band to her, and took my post-run bag and her jacket from her. She was carrying
a disposable camera with which we took photos of each other. Then she took off on her leg.
This was the most humbling race I’ve
ever run for a couple of reasons. Of my 201 races, it’s the first race of any distance in which I averaged slower than
10-minutes/mile, except for a couple of full marathons in which I was pacing someone else or didn’t train for. But,
what I found to be really humbling was being passed by literally hundreds of people throughout my entire leg. Jeff had run
well up front in the pack in the first leg. However, when our team pace slowed from his 7:30 to my 10:30 pace, it seemed like
the entire field passed me during my 5.8 miles. I knew I was impeding some runners who had to run around me....and I always
hate when that happens to me in a race. But there was nothing I could do about it except try to run along the edge of the
road.
The Trip
Sue and I took advantage of the trip
to California to visit a couple of areas that we didn’t get to when we lived in Oxnard near LA for a year and a half 40 years ago. We spent a couple
of days touring and tasting our way through the wine regions of the Napa and Sonoma Valleys before driving down the coast
to Monterey for the race weekend. We finished the trip with an afternoon and overnight in San Francisco
before flying back to St Pete Beach, Florida to spend the next 5-6 weeks cruising our sailboat (Wind Runner) back to the Chesapeake Bay.
The Forum Encounter: Fantastic! It was
marvelous to finally meet Deanna, Mary, Jeff and Kil. And, of course, to see my buddy, Tim, again. We all stayed in the same
hotel where we congregated Friday evening to meet and pick up our race packets from our captain, Deanna, plus a special team
T-shirt that Deanna designed and had made for us. We toasted each other and the Wind Runners with a bottle of wine that Deanna
and Mary provided before heading out to dinner. The rest of the weekend was a continuous series of sharing meals, sightseeing,
and getting to know each other better until we finally had to say goodbye Monday morning. Marvelous people all! I’ve
had a lot of forum encounters and this one was as good as it gets! It was a great weekend that I hope we get a chance to repeat
someday. Many thanks to Deanna for organizing it!
Jim2
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