Pacing...

Let me start off by saying that pacing was a blast! If you ever get the opportunity to pace a race, you should totally take it. I had a great experience... my co-pacer was a friend of mine who has paced before, and running with him is always fun... and the runners in the 1:40 group at the Tobacco Road Half Marathon were a fantastic bunch. Having said this, pacing is not easy. Well, maybe it is for some, but I am not by nature a calm individual...

The Tobacco Road Half Marathon is both my PR (2011) and one of the worst half's I've run (2012), so I have very mixed feelings about the race. I had toyed around with the idea of using it as a tuneup for Boston, but decided against it. However, about 2 weeks out from the race, I agreed to pace the 1:40 group (one of my friends couldn't owing to injury). I had always kind of wanted to volunteer as a pacer for a local half marathon, but usually ended up racing them out of convenience. So, it seemed like the perfect opportunity. And, to make it even better, the other 1:40 pace was one of my friends. And, I had planned a "fake taper" week. And, if everything came together perfectly in Boston, 3:20 would be wahooo x3 (I ran a 3:20:04 at City of Oaks in 2012, which is a similar in terms of where the hills hit). So, pacing the 1:40 half group seemed like a win-win-win situation.

Monday - Saturday: I predictably started to kind of freak out on Monday. What was I thinking? I haven't run a long "tempo" workout in some time. All of my long runs have been at an easy pace thus far. The last two halfs that I ran were in the mid-1:36's, and they weren't exactly a walks in the park.

Then, Tuesday's track workout went well... why was I freaking out anyways? I could totally do a 1:40 half. I had done basically that for a not-so-easy full marathon not too long ago. And, in that race, I had come through the half in the mid-1:37's. I am in better shape now than I was this past fall, so I'd be fine. Plus, I knew my co-pacer could easily run a 1:40 half.

I was back to freaking out by Wednesday. My hamstring felt tight, and our recovery run felt a lot faster than it was. Same with Thursday, and Friday, and Saturday. When I had run the 1:36's in the fall, I had gone out faster and slowed down in the second half. I was going to have to CONSISTENTLY run a 7:38 pace, and the second half of Tobacco Road is uphill. 

Then, Saturday night, I saw my co-pacer post a picture of the 1:50 sign. So, I really began freaking out... until Matt pointed out that no one had their signs yet.

Sunday: It was actually great weather for racing (they had been calling for upper 30's and rain all week, and it was in the upper 40's and not raining). This meant that I could wear shorts and compression socks, and I even had orange compression socks that matched my orange pacer shirt! My pacer shirt was also too big for me and required an 80's style side tie up, which amused me. So, I stopped freaking out.

The Race: We were a little slow the first mile. It's hard to navigate around people with a group, especially with turns and medians. I was trying to hit a 7:38 pace, which was difficult because it was downhill, so I bounced back and forth between over/under. My Garmin had us a bit under pace (I never saw the mile marker), and Matt's and my co-pacer's had us a bit slow. We picked it up through the second, downhill mile, and more than made up the time. My watch was also lapping way too early. Luckily, my co-pacer had printed out the actual times we were supposed to hit on the sign, so we checked up at Mile 3. We were only 5sec off, but my watch had gained 0.1-miles. Grrrrrr. I spent the next couple of miles cursing Garmin and trying to figure out what the real pace was based off of the pace my watch was reading. That turned out to be a lot of math. By Mile 5 we had kind of settled into a pace, and I stopped looking at my watch every 1/4 mile.

We were ~15sec up at the halfway point. I was actually pretty psyched about that. The second half of the race was a net uphill, whereas the first half was a net downhill (amazing how out-and-back courses work like that). I had wanted a little bit of a cushion so that we could maintain the same effort level on the hills without having to maintain the same pace (the two are mutually exclusive). However, I didn't want too much of a cushion because that would have meant risking being too tired by the hills (aka what I had done in 2012). Our goal was to run a steady pace, and we had done that!

It was definitely harder to keep track of Matt and my co-pacer after the turnaround. We had pretty much run together for the first half. However, the course was not the wide, and there were still people going out. The pacers took the more center lane to run interference (which was kind of comical because I'm not exactly a bouncer or anything). I felt like I was back running the 800m... elbows up! We stayed kind-of-ish together. However, in order to pass people, you had to speed up and make a move whenever there was a break in the oncoming "traffic", so the group got spread out a little. From mile 8-10, a sub-group had basically formed that was able to hold the pace we had settled into, even though this section was slightly uphill. My co-pacer was holding the sign, and stayed with the group that was maintaining effort level. We were probably no more than 50yrds apart.

Coming off of the Tobacco Trail at a little over 10 miles was a nice change of scenery for about a minute. I think everyone struggles at this point in the race. It gets hillier, you can see for way too long on the road, and there really is nothing that great to look at. Even though we were ahead now by probably 25-30sec, I didn't want to leave the group I was with. I pretty much figure that when you run with a pace group, you want to break that time and not run it exactly. So, I told them we were going to stay steady and work on picking off people. We did that, and suddenly we started gaining speed even though we were definitely going uphill. I know that the harder surface of the road was returning more energy than the softer surface of the trail, but... crazy people! I tried to hold the pace steady, and keep them distracted (we were discussing past races... one guy had run a 1:44, another guy had missed 1:40 by 16sec, the other woman was staying pretty quiet, as was anyone else who was still with us).

Mile 12 came, and I told them I'd stay with them for the next uphill, and then they had it once we made the turn into the baseball stadium. I'm guessing they were tired (I've been dead at this point both times that I've run the race), but I'm guessing that they also knew that unless something catastrophic happened, they had their goal. I know that feeling, but I also know the panic of cutting it close. We made it up the hill, and they kept going. I pulled back a little bit to run in with some of the people between my co-pacer and I, as well as not be too under pace.

We finished in the lower half of the 1:39's with most of the people that had started with us! After the race, everyone seemed really appreciative of the fact that we ran pretty steady and that they had met their goals. It was a PR for some, and at least close to it for most.

I'll definitely think of this group in Boston... they gave me the confidence that I actually can run a 3:20 pace, at least for the first 13.1!