Meet Day
Awesome day.
The course: Franklin Park. 3k for the women, 5k for the men. That means women had to run a little less than 2 miles.
We begin with meet prep: sleeping in. A fantastic experience that I highly recommend.
And breakfast eating! Also recommendable. MIT Dining started today, and they offered brunch, so part of sleeping in was delaying hunger as well as resting the limbs for work. Dining in Simmons is pretty good - I had a waffle and some eggs and a croissant.
I may have skipped the shake-out run that was semi-prescribed for us to do on our own, but I did take a hike of questionable wisdom - should have kept resting the legs, but the legs were restless, so I took a trip to Shaw's (Star Market, but everyone still calls it Shaw's anyway) and bought my lunch for the week.
Finally actual race prep time rolls around. Just putting on my uniform makes me feel official - it's such a sharp uniform. I may find a picture eventually. But a maroon top with MIT in white on black down the sides, an angry beaver on the small of the back, and black shorts. In our gear we also got soccer sweatpants, which are just the coziest things ever invented, basically. Threw those on, and the MIT Cross Country t-shirt, put my roller Stick in the side of my bag and my water bottle, chucked in my spikes and some extra socks, and basically sauntered out of Simmons like a general badass. Or at least, an 18-year-old girl going to run her first ever collegiate meet. About the same thing, right?
Somehow for a not-a-meet (it's just a 3k against the alumnae), we still got a charter bus down to Franklin Park, which was also classy and added to the badassery, and after putting in some 3/8in spikes per request of the coach, I settled in to some Pandora listening (station based on Bastille; no likes/dislikes. Awesome station) and zoning out before the run.
The race plan was for me to sort of lead out the other two girls in my running group and hit a 6:30 on the first mile and then see if we could push each other in from there. The course is laid out so it's sort of flat for the first mile, and then one really good hill called Bear Cage, and then downhill/flat to the finish, so that if you run 'even' splits you'd actually run 15 seconds slower on the second mile. I was hoping to actually even split, technically then putting in the effort that would get me a negative split on a flat course.
The race, which started promptly at 4:30, had other ideas. Ultimately my goal was to catch the tail end of the next group up ahead of us; to show my coach that I was competitive enough for him to bother keeping on the team, and that was in my head the entire first mile. As a race group, we had decided that a certain girl was to be our goal, and we thought she would go out with a 6:20, so we'd just stay slightly behind her. But I felt pretty good, so I stuck with her or just slightly behind her.
I hit the half-mile at 3:03. That's fast. I didn't want to actively slow down, though, for fear that I would slow down too much, so I just tried to hang on to that effort and came through the mile at 6:13. Not a terrible drop-off - and now that I think back to it, if I had tried from the half-mile to hit a 6:30, it would have been a terrible drop in pace.
The terrible drop in pace came in the last mile. I don't have a 1.5 split, which could have been helpful but maybe not because the half would be somewhere in or right after Bear Cage and it would just be an awful time. After the mile, the girl in the next group up whom we were trying to catch just hit a wall and slowed, so I went by her and tried to keep up with the next girl. My running group had faded behind me and I felt bad about leaving them so soon, and taking them out at a bad pace - I'm still debating the wisdom of my race strategy.
The fact is I'm a bad hill-runner, and I believe that no matter what pace I ran the first mile, I would probably slow down on Bear Cage. So, it would be better for me to have taken the first mile a little fast and not wasted any time on the runnable parts of the course.
So I've reasoned. I finished in 12:41, which was incidentally the same time as my time-trial - except that this was a 3k, not a 3200. If one is running 6:00 pace, a 200 should take about 45 seconds. According to my coach, Bear Cage should only make a 15 second difference between the first and second miles. My splits were 6:13 for the first mile and 6:28 for the second half. This is super-encouraging, since he said 15 seconds - but is that a 15 seconds per mile slower or just 15 seconds slower? I couldn't honestly tell you if I slowed down that much. I probably did, though, so let's say he meant the mile pace was 15 seconds slower, in which case my mile pace for the second mile, if you subtract 15 seconds for terrain and add 45 seconds for the missing 200m, would've been a 6:58. Kind of a pathetic drop-off, which is why I am hoping for the former explanation.
After the race Coach came around to get everyone's mileage for the week. Most encouraging thing of the day: my running buddy, the senior who switched from crew, and I both ran about 25 miles this week - and Coach replied with, "We're going to raise that up a lot," which we both interpreted as having made it.
I'm (almosttt!) official!
The course: Franklin Park. 3k for the women, 5k for the men. That means women had to run a little less than 2 miles.
We begin with meet prep: sleeping in. A fantastic experience that I highly recommend.
And breakfast eating! Also recommendable. MIT Dining started today, and they offered brunch, so part of sleeping in was delaying hunger as well as resting the limbs for work. Dining in Simmons is pretty good - I had a waffle and some eggs and a croissant.
I may have skipped the shake-out run that was semi-prescribed for us to do on our own, but I did take a hike of questionable wisdom - should have kept resting the legs, but the legs were restless, so I took a trip to Shaw's (Star Market, but everyone still calls it Shaw's anyway) and bought my lunch for the week.
Finally actual race prep time rolls around. Just putting on my uniform makes me feel official - it's such a sharp uniform. I may find a picture eventually. But a maroon top with MIT in white on black down the sides, an angry beaver on the small of the back, and black shorts. In our gear we also got soccer sweatpants, which are just the coziest things ever invented, basically. Threw those on, and the MIT Cross Country t-shirt, put my roller Stick in the side of my bag and my water bottle, chucked in my spikes and some extra socks, and basically sauntered out of Simmons like a general badass. Or at least, an 18-year-old girl going to run her first ever collegiate meet. About the same thing, right?
Somehow for a not-a-meet (it's just a 3k against the alumnae), we still got a charter bus down to Franklin Park, which was also classy and added to the badassery, and after putting in some 3/8in spikes per request of the coach, I settled in to some Pandora listening (station based on Bastille; no likes/dislikes. Awesome station) and zoning out before the run.
The race plan was for me to sort of lead out the other two girls in my running group and hit a 6:30 on the first mile and then see if we could push each other in from there. The course is laid out so it's sort of flat for the first mile, and then one really good hill called Bear Cage, and then downhill/flat to the finish, so that if you run 'even' splits you'd actually run 15 seconds slower on the second mile. I was hoping to actually even split, technically then putting in the effort that would get me a negative split on a flat course.
The race, which started promptly at 4:30, had other ideas. Ultimately my goal was to catch the tail end of the next group up ahead of us; to show my coach that I was competitive enough for him to bother keeping on the team, and that was in my head the entire first mile. As a race group, we had decided that a certain girl was to be our goal, and we thought she would go out with a 6:20, so we'd just stay slightly behind her. But I felt pretty good, so I stuck with her or just slightly behind her.
I hit the half-mile at 3:03. That's fast. I didn't want to actively slow down, though, for fear that I would slow down too much, so I just tried to hang on to that effort and came through the mile at 6:13. Not a terrible drop-off - and now that I think back to it, if I had tried from the half-mile to hit a 6:30, it would have been a terrible drop in pace.
The terrible drop in pace came in the last mile. I don't have a 1.5 split, which could have been helpful but maybe not because the half would be somewhere in or right after Bear Cage and it would just be an awful time. After the mile, the girl in the next group up whom we were trying to catch just hit a wall and slowed, so I went by her and tried to keep up with the next girl. My running group had faded behind me and I felt bad about leaving them so soon, and taking them out at a bad pace - I'm still debating the wisdom of my race strategy.
The fact is I'm a bad hill-runner, and I believe that no matter what pace I ran the first mile, I would probably slow down on Bear Cage. So, it would be better for me to have taken the first mile a little fast and not wasted any time on the runnable parts of the course.
So I've reasoned. I finished in 12:41, which was incidentally the same time as my time-trial - except that this was a 3k, not a 3200. If one is running 6:00 pace, a 200 should take about 45 seconds. According to my coach, Bear Cage should only make a 15 second difference between the first and second miles. My splits were 6:13 for the first mile and 6:28 for the second half. This is super-encouraging, since he said 15 seconds - but is that a 15 seconds per mile slower or just 15 seconds slower? I couldn't honestly tell you if I slowed down that much. I probably did, though, so let's say he meant the mile pace was 15 seconds slower, in which case my mile pace for the second mile, if you subtract 15 seconds for terrain and add 45 seconds for the missing 200m, would've been a 6:58. Kind of a pathetic drop-off, which is why I am hoping for the former explanation.
After the race Coach came around to get everyone's mileage for the week. Most encouraging thing of the day: my running buddy, the senior who switched from crew, and I both ran about 25 miles this week - and Coach replied with, "We're going to raise that up a lot," which we both interpreted as having made it.
I'm (almosttt!) official!
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