Wednesday Weblog for August 17, 2022 |
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Quote of the Week:
Long distance running is 90 percent mental and the other half is physical.-- Rich Davis
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Leading Off: Yes, It Is a Running Story, Sort of |
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Sunday I will run in my 8th Falmouth Road Race, along with more than 12,000 others who like running in high humidity in August. This is a story about a series of races where one of the competitors was the daughter of a volunteer I worked with. She is now turning 16 and pictured with me here.
At the time of this story, she was much younger and eager to... well, read on.
The photo below is another great picture of me. The runners about to enter the 'no breeze' zone of the race. I am a little hard to see, but I am the one in the ugly pink and blue singlet, swearing under my breath at some chatty folks to concentrate and get out of my way. I am right behind a guy who shouldn't be wearing spandex, and just ahead of an 11-year-old-girl, and I am flying. Not sure you can tell that from the photo?
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The 7 Mile Falmouth Road Race has been 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.
It was a huge fundraiser for the non-profit I was dedicated to as well, raising more than $100,000 over the years as volunteers and staff ran as members of the 'charity' program.
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 to complete the course the first time and stay out of the medical tent. But I was hooked.
The day after that first race, I started planning for the 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. (I still do).
I try 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 get attention, and no guy pays much attention to his toenails.
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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 this young lady earlier in the morning because I was still hurting over being beat by this young girl when she was 10 years old the year before, running her first Falmouth Road Race.
Anyway the challenge was on. I now had the edge I personally needed to excel: the opportunity to defeat an 11 year old. This particular 11 year old quite frankly won the trash talking contest before the race because my vocabulary was.....SEVERELY restricted. Vocabulary is limited when trash talking with an 11 year old. Lots of words were unavailable to me.
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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? 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, 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.
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Oh, and one of the 4073 behind me was an 11-year-old. This photo is the view she had of me for most of the race.
Unfortunately for me, the following year, perhaps motivated by being embarrassed by a senior citizen, she finished slightly ahead of me. We haven't faced off in a race since then. She quit while she was ahead.
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Surprise Photo at the End: Beat by a Girl-Again |
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Beat by a Girl
Ayla Brown, former American Idol contestant and Country Music Artist, as well as morning personality on WKLB in Boston, wrote and recorded a song that inspired the title of this Weblog. You can see her perform it here.
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Joe's Positive Post of the Week |
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Ed Doherty
774-479-8831
www.ambroselanden.com
ed-doherty@outlook.com
Forgive any typos please.
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