Yankee Homecoming 10 Miler

That's it. I'm done. No more racing for a while, till Hood to Coast in three weeks anyway. Despite the "heat emergency", I and 1000 other runners showed up for the summer classic Yankee Homecoming 10 Miler last night in beautiful Newburyport, Massachusetts. Must have been 100F, muggy, everyone was sweating just standing still.

I planned on taking it pretty easy as I haven't been handling hot weather running very well anyway, but I pretty much bonked at 6 miles, really awful slog for the last 2 miles, really wanted to stop and am glad just to have finished. An embarrassingly slow 1:15:00, 7:30 average pace — positive splits — first 5 at 7:00, second 5 at 8:00, ugh. (I ran a 7:17 pace 10.2 mile training run just a couple weeks ago!) It was partly the heat, but not totally. Lots of friendly townfolk out with the hoses, I stayed relatively not-so-hot and wet in fact, but I hadn't thought about the implications of my shoes getting so drenched — they must have weighed at least two pounds a piece with the water and all by mile 3, and I really started feeling it. Maybe I should have just taken them off and gone unshod. And it was after work, usually not a great time of day for me. And did I mention it was hot? My wife and kids think I am absolutely bonkers.

So there's my litany of little excuses. What I really have no excuse for is that fact that I just haven't been putting in enough long runs to expect any quality or consistency for a 10 mile race. It's been a little wreckless and lazy of me to be racing so much (7 races since June 3rd) without putting in the required training — my endurance past 7 miles is really lacking. Time to get back to work, forget the excitement of races, hit the road and recall the loneliness of the long distance runner.

(For the record, since last Saturday's 11.1 miler, just rest and then 50 minutes pretty hard on elliptical Monday, still nursing right shin, not much worse after this race, thank goodness.)