Better than Last Year!

Today I ran the Queens Half-Marathon in Flushing Meadow, Queens, NY. I ran it in 1:36:45 (7:24s), an accomplishment I felt good about. My Age Grade Percentage was up to 61.67%, but more importantly, I managed to generally increase my speed over the course of the race after a slow start. I didn’t catch up to Elizabeth, though, who pulled off a finish about a minute earlier than me (1:35:44, or 7:19s). She placed 17th among women–again, running on an injured leg!

My slow start was partly because of a delayed race start (police hadn’t cleared the roadway just yet), which meant I felt a bit queasy, intestinal, and urinary. The feeling stayed on my mind in the first couple miles or so, when I started to convince myself to take my mind off the sensations so that I could dedicate the mental energy to running. It worked, and I distracted myself from the thoughts and feelings.

Around when Elizabeth hit the 6-mile marker, she was on a turnaround and shouted my name; I eventually got to that point and roughly calculated being about 2 minutes behind her. I figured it would take about 4 miles to catch her if I shaved off about 30 second per mile (I had been averaging about 7:40s up to about then), and fortunately my body performed, giving me splits between 7:08 and 7:14 regularly. That was an awesome feeling. However, I never saw Elizabeth after she shouted my name. That surprised me given her level of training: She’d basically not run in two weeks except for last week’s race, and her last long run was 12 miles around a 7:40 pace in heat. I was expecting she’d tank at some higher mile and I’d catch her in my faster pace, but it never happened. She’s really gotten fantastic.

When it got to the finish, I set my sights on passing a person about 90 feet ahead of me. In the last stretch, I was right next to him, and I still had juice in my body. I wasn’t going to really sprint until the last turn, and then I did. I had to squeeze between two side-by-side runners (narrowly missing an accident!) and charged toward the finish, just after hearing my name called.

I was so impressed by my run in this race. I started slow but I believed I could get faster, and I did get faster … and I was able to sustain faster. And when it came to the end, I was able to get fast again (even though I started to fade a bit around mile 10). I beat my time from last year (which admittedly was much hotter), and I managed a respectable pace.

This new course was much better than last year’s. Last year’s had us out for a bit on the parkway, which wasn’t fun for me. This year was all within the park, and while we covered some of the same ground twice, there were turns to keep it pretty interesting, and enough of the race had a slight downhill (which I used strategically to go faster). The only real uphills were the overpasses, which were short and quickly mounted.

Here are my unofficial Garmin stats (you can see the course is like spaghetti!):