The 7 Mile Falmouth Road Race is my personal Super Bowl each August. Running it for the first time, at the time, was the achievement of a lifetime for me, considering my age and the late start I had with this running thing. 7 Miles with 12,000 others on the shores of Cape Cod with free frozen yogurt bars at the finish? Are you kidding me? Who else gets free frozen yogurt bars after a race? It took me about an hour and half (1’29”) to complete the course the first time and stay out of the medical tent. But I was hooked.
The day after the race, I started planning for next year. Seriously. I tracked everything I did all year, gearing up for the event using (surprise) an Excel spreadsheet to help. I tracked every run, every distance, my average heart rate, maximum heart rate, average pace, pace per mile, etc. All year. I tried to leave no detail to chance. My socks, my shoes, my shoelaces, my hydration, my nutrition, my playlist, my knee wrap, my foam rolling, my strength training, my warm up, my sleep, my damn toenails even got attention, and no guy pays much attention to his toenails.
So picture me, with 365 days of preparation, hundreds of miles of training runs, emery-boarded toenails and all, standing at the start line with 12,000 runners on an unusually cool August morning 20 yards from the Atlantic Ocean, with adrenalin pumping through my veins. (It wasn’t really pumping pumping, and I think it is arteries anyway, but I’ve always wanted to use the phrase ‘pumping through my veins,’ and now I have).
My fourth personal Super Bowl is about to start and…..an 11 year old girl starts taunting me. (I know that line surprised you.) Delaney is the daughter of a friend who is also running, and I might have challenged the young lady earlier in the morning because I was still hurting over being beat by a girl when she was 10 years old the year before, running her first Falmouth Road Race. Anyway the challenge was on. I had the edge I personally needed to excel: the opportunity to defeat an 11 year old. This particular 11 year old who quite frankly won the trash talking contest before the race because my vocabulary was.....SEVERELY restricted when talking with an 11 year old, if you know what I mean. Lots of words were unavailable to me.
Now before you get too judgmental about my attitude, why don't you run 7 miles with a ten year old and see how you feel when you get beat by a girl. It is a serious ego blow, and you don't have to be a manly man to be devastated by such a result. You also have to give the kid a lot of credit for picking on me, I mean for running that far that fast. Probably no one reading this could run that far when you were ten.
With a little help from the weather person, who delivered a cool, low humidity day: I knew I was going to set a personal best before the race even started. With a great year of training plus being motivated by taunting from an 11 year old girl, I was able to run the Falmouth Road Race in the astonishing (to me) time of one hour and twelve minutes. Let me expand on that: everyone was astonished. Why astonished? That’s 17 minutes faster than my first time, and ten minutes and 32 seconds faster than my previous best. The first year I ran this event, I was hoping to have at least one person finish behind me. On my fourth try in 2018 according to the official records, 4,073 runners finished behind me. Four-thousand, seventy-three.
Oh, and one of them was an 11 year old girl. You may have guessed that she did edge me out again last year when she was a powerful 12 years old, and I reverted to the status of being beat by a girl.
Hi Delaney, I know your mom will show you this. See you next year. I'm not getting older, I'm getting faster.
