Race Day!

The night before was extremely restless, I tried to read my book to get myself tired but that only lead me to get more engrossed with it. I finally fell asleep around 1 and woke at 430 ready to go. I met V at 648 (not 645) and we drove on down to the event. The first thing we noticed was that it was quite a turnout, alot more people than I had expected. I felt rushed as we assembled our things and made our way to the starting line. Turned out we had plenty of time to pee and stretch before we had to start. V was sure to point out that she won the bet and that I was the only person there smoking. One guy even made a comment about my smoking. I wanted to make sure to atleast beat him. We made our way to the starting coral and looked at each other nervously as we watched the approaching countdown. Before we knew it we were off! It was pretty exhilarating right from the get go, my adrenaline had kicked in I was very confident with myself. The crowd of people made it a bit uncomfortable at first but it seemed to fizzle out quick and we had our little group. The first mile went great! My GPS had alerted me that we completed mile one with a time of 10:03, ahead of our planned pace, I was thrilled. Soon after V seemed to slow down a bit and I realized that we had been pushing faster than our planned pace and was fine with slowing it down a bit. The next three miles were pretty hard on me. I kept seeing racer after racer slowly pass us by, what made it worse was that the guy that made the smoking comment was only a couple feet ahead, but gaining. I wanted so bad to start really pushing and reeling in my competition. My competitive drive kicked in and all I wanted to do was start passing people up. At around the 5 mile mark we started a pretty big hill and half way up I could see people slowing, I grabbed V's hand and tried to drag her up the hill, I wanted soo badly to pass up some racers. We got to the half way turn around and GPS had informed me we were over our planned pace of 2 hours 30 minutes. I said to V," ready for the reality check" and she replied with, "let's just run". That's when I started to get frustrated and discouraged. I still felt like I hadn't expended any of my energy thus far and never even started breathing heavily, I wanted to really start picking up the pace! Around mile 8 I could tell V was getting pretty tired as we started to approach another hill. I lied and told her we were on pace for a 3 hour 20 minute finish in hopes that it would give her some motivation to really start picking it up, I later found out that it had the opposite effect and really killed her moral. Instead of wanting to push it she felt defeated. A mile later I made a comment that JP would have been finishing her marathon already. Again in hopes that it would be a motivating factor to really wanna pick it up and finish strong, again I found out later that it had been in vain and caused nothin but a negative effect. By this time we were running for about 5 minutes at a time and walking for about 30 seconds, doing that in intervals until mile 10. I was getting very frustrated and I wasnt really doing my best to hide it. I could see that V was really fatigued but wanted her so badly to find her rhythm and really step on it. The last three miles were tough, she could tell that I was frustrated and felt like I was disappointed in her, which really dragged her down. The last half mile became somewhat scary. V didn't seem herself and seemed almost disoriented, she kept saying how cold she was, and when I touched her leg I came to find that she wasn't joking, her skin was ice cold! She looked dizzy and confused but kept insisting on running. She jogged through the finish and gave the guy a high five after being awarded her medal. The guy told me to make sure I look after her as she didn't seem right. We sat down and V drank some water and got a plate of food while I walked to the car to get my smokes. I came back and she seemed to be feeling alot better, even had a coffee in her hand, and V with coffee usually means shes doing well. V pushed herself to exhaustion, expended every ounce of energy she had and i couldn't of asked for a better effort from her. She pushed herself almost to the point of collapsing, she's gotta be the toughest person I know. She did great! We both did! We ended up finishing with a time of 2:42:06. We wanted under 2:30 but we wernt really too far off.

It was a really wonderful event, the weather was spectacular!! The racers seemed very kind and it was an amazing atmosphere to be in. I spoke with V about the race after I got to work and found out just how badly I had weakened her spirit with the comments I made. I felt terrible. I became so worked up and my competitive edge kicked in that all I wanted to do was win, or atleast run my best. I forgot about what was most important and the real reason we started running. My frustrations and selfishness ruined moral and really took away from the fun. The thing I love most about running is being with Vanessa, just being near her, not having to say anything at all, just running side by side for hours at a time and knowing that just being next to her is enough. Nothing matters, all calamity in my life seems to dissipate. It's so calming. I forgot about all that during the race, I forgot the reasons we started doing this in the first place, just to have fun and forget about the worries of life. I'm glad I learned what my mistakes were so I can avoid them in the future. I've learned so much about her and even more about myself during this experience. It's been a great milestone, I achieved something I never would have done on my own and gained a best friend and running partner for life. I've never been prouder of the two of us for coming this far. We've been through alot together and our friendship and running career has only just started.

I couldn't help but sign us up for our next event. Six Tunnels, March 17th.