Context: Ran my first ever timed race this past weekend, the first of at least 4 trail races I will be doing this year. Likely to be more. In addition, this was a training run for an upcoming half-marathon which I will be running.
Training: Recently upped my mileage to about 30-40 miles per week, with a long run on Saturdays, a mid-week run in the 8-9 mile range sandwiched between 10k runs, and a 5k thrown on top of all that. The good is that the base mileage is finally there. Nutrition and rest wise, well, that could have been done better...had three beers the night before and didn't get too much sleep since a friend from PDX came up to run this as well.
The Race: Show up. Beautiful area, fairly minimal set-up. Everybody is nice and accommodating, and the staff is super easy to work with when I ask for a shirt my friend was hoping to pick-up. She wasn't able to make it, as she's dealing with another injury. Bummer. See another friend who is signed up for the half-marathon and actually ends up PR'ing it. We have very different days. This was really my first race, and there was a ton of anticipation and excitement coming out the gate, which means HI I RAN WAY TOO FAST/HARD considering the not-so-good things I put in my body last night. That, combined with the heat (probably about 80 out), lack of any sort of wind in the woods, and my general terrible pacing meant that I met my lower of two goals, but was much slower than my road 10ks.
Mile 2.5 rolls around and I have no idea how much farther it is, I figured it was way closer to 3.1 at that point and time to start the second loop. Bonking ensues. Aka holy shit, why is this so hard today!?.
Lots of turns, quick turns, very few straight sections, and my hip mobility really slowed me down going through a lot of the uphill turns and twists. Just another thing to work on.
Aftermath: Signed up for a couple more trail runs, and am very committed to doing a better job with adding quality runs and maybe a yoga night to my schedule.
Same. If flag or I wrote the description, it would say: "pretty boring". So this was a nice surprise, and a reminder that I need to get up and maybe walk around while my code compiles.
Glad you at least read through it. Have a lot of races coming up this year, many of which are bigger and more exciting than this one. Maybe I'll do write ups on some of those, too.
I also had this when I ran my first race (5K) a few years ago. Followed a C25K program to the letter, had a PR around 26 minutes but the adrenaline in the first mile meant that I was going wayyy too fast. Thus the last 2 km were agonizingly, painfully difficult and I ended up with a time of somewhere around 33 minutes if I recall correctly.This was really my first race, and there was a ton of anticipation and excitement coming out the gate, which means HI I RAN WAY TOO FAST/HARD
I'm often reluctant to give advice as everyone has different training, goals, and body. For me, I think the single best thing in my training has been running hill intervals. There's a hill leading out of a local park that's perfect. I drive to the far side of the park, run across it to warm up, then run as fast as I can up the hill. I walk back down and repeat until I feel like I'm not sprinting or think my form is poor (poor form leading to poor habits). This is four times, currently, up from three. I take nutrition pretty seriously. Maybe too seriously, but I haven't had a bad run when I did it "right." I love the #racereport tag.
You're absolutely right about hills! My goal has been to up my base mileage and days running per week to about where it's at right now, and then start doing workouts like threshold and interval training to improve speed. Hills are very much going to be a part of that! Nice running this past weekend, by the way! Do you track your nutrition?
I track my daily food, though I don't pay it much attention beyond adding it to MyFitnessPal. My diet is pretty static, with mostly the same food each week, so I'm sure I'm hitting my goals for nutrition. My half marathon routine is to get up three hours before race time and eat a meal bar and drink a bottle of Gatorade. I wash it down with a cup of coffee to help it all pass before the run. This gets something like 700 calories, electrolytes, and fluid in me ahead of the run. My nutrition during the run is to eat an energy gel every three to four miles. It isn't that I need a gel after three miles, it's that around mile nine I needed one six miles ago. I bonked on a 20K a year ago around mile 9. I've seen writeups where runners scoff at any nutrition for runs under twenty miles. There's an Ed Viesturs quote that goes something like "all I know is this is how I like to do it." I think that applies here, too. The advice I most agree with is to experiment. See what works for you during training runs, and do that on race day.