gretchen says

A new race report!

I’ve been running all along, and just haven’t blogged about it much. But I’ve been keeping to my 2013 goal of running the month’s number as a distance (4 in April, 5 in May, 6 in June, etc), and this weekend I participated in the 3 mile Race for Grand Lake Stream. It was a fun race and one I will definitely do again. It supports the Downeast Lakes Land Trust (which is a pretty special organization) and had the best setup ever. The town’s schoolbus and driver drove us to Big Lake Landing, where we walked a little bit into the camp road at the end (which is dirt) and where, waiting for us, was literally a line drawn in the dirt for the start line. The bus driver yelled “ready, set, go!” and started his stopwatch, and we were off, and then he drove back to town to the finish line, with the stopwatch, which was then used to record our times. No chips, balloon arches, etc – just a simple road race.

It was SO. HOT. And because of that, I wasn’t really pushing myself too hard, because the heat just wrecks me, even when I’m not running (which is what I am fearing about B2B next month.) I just tried to be slow and steady. I was leapfrogging a girl who was younger than me, and telling her the mile markers (yay for my Garmin! I love that thing…) and the best pass I made was at 2 miles when I managed to pass…. an elderly man with a cane, who was walking. I am not. even. kidding. But it was just sooooo hot. When I did my 6.7 run the weekend before, I went straight to the lake and jumped in, running clothes and all, to cool off, and I wanted to do the same after this race, but Dave had the girls at the park and with him, the keys, so I had to track that down and go home and just take a cold shower because, seriously, SO HOT. So I was feeling kind of crappy about the run, and had hoped to do better, but then I looked at my time – by my Garmin it was 36:48 (and on the results page – where, I had to laugh, they spelled my name wrong, of all the places I thought would know how to spell Schaefer, it was the DLLT – I am listed as 37:29). Which is still super slow, but the OTHER 3 mile race I’ve done is the Turkey Trot, I did in 39:27 – so basically, almost a 3 min better time, in worse conditions, and on a course that slowly goes uphill the whole time (because you are running upstream…) So really, this makes me excited to do the Turkey Trot again, and see how I can improve even more! And the bigger victory is that I did the race – I wrote about it 2 years ago, here, and that time I did 3.1 going the other direction, downhill, and that took more than 45 minutes. (I would’ve done the race in 2012, but we weren’t up there for the holiday that year.)

The next one on deck is the Beach 2 Beacon. I am already stressing about the heat, but I know I can finish it, even if I’m dragging. I’m just hoping for rain.