Look Ma, No Watch!

Next Saturday is the Cannonball Half Marathon. I'm toying with the idea of running the race without a watch.

I'll pause a moment to let the gravity of that last comment sink in.

Think about it. It's me. Anal-retentive running girl. No watch means not knowing my pace per mile. Am I going too fast and blowing my race? Am I running too slow and need to pick it up? Am I really considering running 13.1 miles as fast as I can based solely on how I feel? What sort of cockamamie-hippie-communist crap is that? 

I'm pretty sure I'm going to do it. 

I've got a few things working in my favor. One, I didn't train very hard this summer so, watch or no watch, I don't expect to go out there and kill it. If I was really trying to hit a time, I'd wear a watch. Two, not wearing a watch gives me a built-in excuse if I do terrible on the run. "Oh, you see it wasn't really MY fault. I wasn't wearing a watch and I misjudged my pace by, like, 2 minutes per mile. Oopsie!" And finally, I've had a couple of runs lately where I haven't looked at my watch until well into my run and I've surprised myself with my pace. 

That last part is what I'm hoping will happen at Cannonball. I ran a quick 6 miles when I was in Chicago. As I was running, I guessed I was around an 8:30 pace. When I looked at my watch at mile 4, I was at an 8:02. If you told me I had to go out and run an 8:02, I'd be exhausted. When I just ran and didn't worry about it, I felt great. 

Of course there's always the danger of feeling so good at the start that I go out too fast and ruin the latter part of the run, but I'm willing to chance it. I've heard a number of runners say that they ran some of their best times on days they forgot or didn't wear their watches. 

For this half-marathon, anything under one hour and fifty minutes is a win. A 1:45 would be incredible and if I run under 1:45, I will never wear a watch again. 

How 'bout it runners? Any of you ever run a race without a watch? What were the results?

The Blue Ridge Relay Is In The Books

It's over! We did it! Team MG Easy ran 208 miles in 30 hours, 45 minutes, and 41 seconds. That's an 8:52 average pace. 

I thought I would write a long post about the race but I don't think I'm going to, for the main reason that an experience like this is so hard to capture and I fear not doing it justice. I could tell you some of the details - maneuvering a 15-person white cargo van up twisting mountain roads that aren't wide enough for a moped; stashing wet smelly clothes in airtight plastic bags; eating GORP by the handful; tracking our kills (runners you pass on the course); the snap bracelet; the jokes (Nathan - You go, girl!); the dark hours between 1 and 5 AM when it was cold and everyone has passed the point of exhaustion and we still had to suit up and run; how much we looked forward to the transition zones so we could see Van #2 and hear their stories; the total camaraderie of being surrounded day and night by runners on the same crazy adventure as you... it was an all-encompassing experience. I feel like I've been gone for a month versus 48 hours. 

I did okay on my runs. I started out way too fast on my first leg and it cost me. Lesson learned. Start slow, finish fast. 

The other thing I learned is that the human body, particularly my body, is capable of handling much more than I give it credit for. My former way of thinking which looked like, "I can't run hard today because I just did a leg workout yesterday and I need to rest" no longer cuts it. If I can run up a mountain after being awake for over 30 hours, most of that time spent in a van, I can handle a P90-X workout followed by a run, don't you think?

Now that I've caught up on my sleep (I slept almost 16 hours yesterday), I already miss the race. I would totally run this monster again. I'm headed outside right now to plaster the 208/36 sticker on my car. 

We earned it.