So… September has been a fun month. After returning to
Saratoga from Electric Zoo I made haste to jump back into being an endurance
athlete. A few track workouts with one of my training partners, James, were
some solid reminders that it takes hard work to get back to fitness. James is a
great guy, and I love the hard work he puts into being an athlete day in and
day out.
As my blog has probably already given away, I am addicted to
training and racing. My second addiction may be a little less obvious, which is
retail therapy. Yes, I love to shop until I drop, and September may be the
worst month of my life when it comes to giving into said temptation. As far as
clothes to wear out and about go, I could give a hoot. But when it comes to
training and racing gear, especially bike stuff, I am clinically addicted. One
of the best reasons to be a runner and leave cycling, swimming, and triathlon
alone is the cash savings. If all I did was run, I would spend a mere $300-400
a year on race entries and shoes. In fact, since I can still fit into kid’s
size running shoes, I spend about half as much money on shoes as my friends and
training partners. When it comes to cycling, however, it seems frugality is
impossible. This month alone I have bought a Specialized Tarmac with full
Ultegra and a Dura Ace rear derailleur with an Ultegra wheel set, a pair of red
stainless steel Speedplay pedals, and a pair of Gaerne Mythos cycling shoes.
BUT in my defense, I paid nowhere near retail value for any of these items. The
Tarmac is valued at $3700 new with all Ultegra components, and I got it for
$1467 with a derailleur worth an extra $100 and a wheel set worth about $400
more than stock wheels. The pedals are worth $200 new and I got them for $110,
and the shoes are worth $400 (and only sold in Europe), bought for $140. That
amounts to about $3,000 in savings, and I would like to look at everything as a
glass half full, even if my bank account appears 90% empty.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve still been putting in some hard
work! I just finished my second 50+ mile running week. If you know anything
about my resume as an endurance athlete, you would know that running is my
greatest weakness, so when I tell you that on Saturday, September 22nd
I dropped a 38:20 10k (GPS says 6.1 miles, so probably closer to a 38:57), I
promise that the effort is there, not just a ton of cash spending.
I also had my first go at cyclocross, the sport that is half
road cycling, half mountain biking, and all pain and suffering. I turned my
girl, Annie’s, old road bike into a cross bike with just a $40 investment in
tires, and at the first Adirondack Cyclocross in Johnstown, NY, ripped it up!
Yes, I may have been beaten by a few hotshots with actual cross bikes worth
over $1,000, but I guarantee that nobody spent as little as I did to make it
across the finish line in fine fashion. I finished 11th out of 20, which is
satisfactory for my first attempt.
The highlight of the month, however, had to be this past
weekend (29th-30th). It literally rained every hour of every day this weekend,
but I still managed to get in a handful of running miles and show up for the
Run for the ROC 5k in strong form. The race is sponsored by Saratoga Hospital
to benefit the radiology oncology center, so there were a bunch of my coworkers
present. The race also attracted a good sized crowd of Skidmore Running
Clubbers (11 am start), so I had an opportunity to catch up with a few college
friends as well.
After a thorough warm-up run, I made my way to the start,
where I toed the line with a couple of familiar faces from some of the other
local races. Matt Ingler is a gentleman who runs very similar paces to me, so I
more or less knew what to expect from him. I have to give the guy a boatload of
credit; He had run the Adirondack Marathon, possibly the hardest marathon
course within 200 miles, the weekend before, and was gearing up for the
Hudson-Mohawk River Marathon this coming weekend. Just a little 5k sandwich
this Sunday morning! Shaun Donegan also showed up at the start line, making a
fashion statement as always in patched up cut-off jeans (he took them off just
before the start). Shaun is an animal of a runner who stands on a whole
different level from me. This guy runs ultra-marathons, not because he is too
slow to do well in shorter race distances, but because he is that jacked of a
run. He came to the 5k Sunday morning after participating in the Ragnar relay,
a 200 mile race from Saratoga to Lake Placid, the Friday and Saturday before.
He would eventually win Run for the ROC in a time of 16:25.
But enough about Shaun! I felt great at the starting line
and was ready to run relaxed but fast for the first mile, hoping to gradually
build into a slightly more aggressive pace as the race progressed. I forgot my
GPS watch so I don't have any splits, but I executed this race perfectly as
planned. From the start, the runners around me looked like Olympic sprinters,
as always. with no GPS watch to tell me my pace, I had to trust that they were
going out too hard, as is very typical in local 5k runs. In the first mile I
slowly worked my way through the dying crowd from about 15th or so all the way
up to 4th, where I sat content for most of the second mile. In the second mile
I began to creep up on Matt Ingler, and I knew we had a good race on our hands.
We alternated between 3rd and 4th for quite some time, and ran stride for
stride some as well. Knowing the course as well as I could have, I sweated it
out with Matt until a sharp turn with about 0.2 miles to the finish, where I
darted for a tangent run line, grit my teeth, and never looked back. I held
onto my lead for the last stretch in front of the iconic horse track of
Saratoga and came in with a time of 17:43, and 3rd place overall! Average pace
comes out to about 5:43 per mile. Besides the time, this race felt great for me
because it has given me the confidence that I can hunker down and dig when I
find myself in a close race, something that has long been a recurring weakness
in nearly all of my triathlons this season. I have to attribute my performance
to a combination of lots of training miles, a little bit of cutting loose (this
was also Skidmore's alumni weekend, so I may have partied a tad), and a
disciplined pacing strategy. I can't wait to carry some of these lessons to my
training and racing next summer in pursuit of Kona qualification.
Hope you all enjoy this blog, it was written under the
influence of alcohol (don’t judge!), so hopefully you all had as much fun
reading it as I had writing it. I'm taking the Certified Strength and
Conditioning Specialist exam next weekend in New York. Hard to believe I'm
still studying even outside of college. Happy training, thanks for reading!
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