Fairfield Half-Marathon 2012 Race Review

As I noted over the weekend, the Fairfield Half-Marathon was Sunday, and at least for me, it was kind of a disaster.  With that in mind, I don’t really feel like doing a full Race Report.  But I always autopsy these races—good or bad—to try to figure out what lessons I can learn, and this particular race is no exception.  So this is more of a Race Review than anything, and with any luck, it’ll be a bit shorter than these things usually are.

The backstory here is that I’m a former Division 1 swimmer turned triathlete.  My wife Sally is a pure runner, and though she never competed back in school, she’s become talented enough lately that she’s often in a position to place—and sometimes even to win—her age group when we run smaller local races.  Last season I taught Sally to swim, and we did a couple of triathlons together.  Then we closed out the season with the Hartford Half Marathon in October and decided to focus the next season on running.  Given that Sally had just focused a season on my sport, I thought that seemed fair.

So far, so good.

With all of that said, the season itself has been kind of a wreck for me.  I got a flat during Brian’s Beachside Boogie, was less than a minute off of the lead for my age group at the only triathlon I did this season without even knowing it, and then tried to set myself up for the Fairfield Half, knowing that for personal and professional reasons, it was likely to be my last race of the season.

But. 

I had a pretty bad heat stroke back when I was in the Army, and I’ve struggled with the heat ever since.  In fact, during my heat stroke, my body temperature got up to 107-degrees, and it stayed there for damned-near two hours.  Fact is, I almost died.  I remember that the docs were vaguely surprised when I woke up that day, and it’s something of a miracle that I didn’t wake up with permanent brain or liver damage.  With that said, the event did permanently change my body chemistry a little.  It took me about eight months to fully recover from that injury, and I’ve never felt like I was the same guy, athletically speaking.

So bottom line, making my A-Race a half marathon at the end of June was something of a risk.  I knew that at the time.  However, it’s been more than ten years since my heat stroke, and I thought I could manage it.

In the event, I don’t think that was a correct assumption.

Leading up to the race, I ran a lot.  Not necessarily a lot of times per week, but I’d been putting in 10-mile-plus runs for at least a month before the race.  In addition, I’d been swimming once a week, and I ride part of my commute every day on my foldie.  If you read this space regularly, then you know that I feel like I was running like crap in the weeks before the half, but I’d been riding well and swimming well, and I don’t think the problem was my overall fitness.  Maybe that was wrong, but at this point, it’s a little hard to judge.

Anyway, we had ninety-plus degree heat the week before the race, and I rode in it twice and felt fine.  However, the weekend before the race, I put in my last long run, a twelve-miler, and felt like utter garbage.  Maybe I was over-trained at that point?  Maybe I needed a little more rest?  I don’t know.  Regardless, when we got to race day, I felt much worse running than I’d felt in the weeks prior, and that after doing very little for a full week.  Truth is, I don’t know how to explain it except to say that the race start was about an hour and a half later than I’d been running in the weeks prior, and as a consequence, it was much hotter outside.

Race Day and the Race

Sally and I hoped to get to the race at around seven or seven-fifteen.  However, there was a ton of traffic trying to get into Jennings Beach that morning, and we wound up getting there at about seven-fifty, for a race start at eight-thirty.  I had to rush the kids up to check-in, find Sally’s mom and drop off the kids, check us in, check our bags, wait in the line to pee, and basically run around like a maniac for thirty-five of the forty minutes we had pre-race.  That wasn’t good, but I got to the race’s start line with about five minutes to spare, and I stretched as best I could.  I only saw Sally long enough to hand her her race number and grab her bag so that I could check it.  We’d been arguing all morning—actually, that little fight was one of the worst we’ve ever had in ten years of marriage—so frankly, it was fine with me that I was on my own.  Still, when the race started, I was already sweating, and I would have been hard-pressed to give a good reason for even being there in the first place.

Given all of that, it’s maybe no surprise that I made it a little over an hour before I fell apart.  The weather had been predicted for the low- to mid-seventies, but it was at least in the high seventies when the race began, and the course itself has very little shade.  I was in a bad mood, and I was thirsty when we started.  By the time the first hour had passed, it was probably eighty degrees, and I just didn’t want to be there.  I started getting light-headed around Mile Seven, and unwilling to risk my health on what at that point felt like a fool’s errand, I decided to run-walk the rest of the race.

After that, it was weird.  The Fairfield Half has plenty of water stops, and I took two or three cups of water or Gatorade at every one.  So I had plenty of fluids.  But I still couldn’t control my body temperature, and I couldn’t run more than ten minutes at a stretch.  Needless to say, that second hour was its own special kind of Hell.  I kind of pulled it together when we reached Mile Eleven, but even then, I had to walk a part of Mile Twelve.  I wound up finishing the race in 2:19:19--having averaged almost eleven minutes per mile—and that's more than twenty minutes slower than I’d been in the Hartford Half just eight months prior.  It was a good bit slower than I’d been on a similar twelve-mile course just a week earlier.

At this point, my season is over, and I don’t know what the point of it was.  I’m sore—more from dehydration more than from exertion—and I’m frustrated, and more than anything, I’m determined to spend more time racing bikes next season.  Beyond that, I don’t know what to tell you.

The Fairfield Half is a well-run race, and there're plenty of water stations along the way, but it's crowded as all Hell, and it starts at least an hour later than a summer race has any right to start.  You want to ight through that?  Go ahead.  Me, I'm gonna do something different next year.