Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Regret Signing Up?

I left my last post with a to be continued, well here is the rest of the story!

I have already signed up for Run the Bluegrass half marathon, actually my mom signed me up as part of my Christmas present Thanks Mom:) This is the third year for the half and they decided to change to course to an entirely new course. They also offer practice runs on the course a couple of times a month. Early last week, one of my fairly new running buddies/friend (just started kinda hanging out at races last summer :) Sarah asked me if I would like to go to the practice run. OF COURSE! If I have a chance to learn the course I definitely want to do so. Then a couple of days later she asked if I wanted to do the entire course. I have NOT had high mileage for a LONG time and haven't had many long runs plus this run made my third day in a row of running, so I told Sarah that I would gladly do the entire course but I will be very slow.
There was about 15 people that showed up all of which was already familiar with the course, you could tell they always attend the practice runs. Every one was really nice coming up to us asking our names and such. The race director asked if we had reviewed the map, of course NOT, no problem he said "when you see the chickens turn left". Chickens??
Off we went, not everyone was doing the entire course some was only doing 7mi. The weather would have been perfect if the wind would have stopped blowing, our faces were so cold. The first mile went by and we felt pretty good. I was worried about having tired legs but was feeling confident. Then right at the end of the first mile was the first MONSTER hill! I am talking about one you have to lean into! That was just the beginning....the entire course is nothing but hill after hill after hill!! Thinking back I heard someone say while we was waiting 21hills in 13 miles, I didn't count them but there may have been more than that! And they aren't just small steep hills they are long steep hills. About 3mi in we started doing run/walk thankfully my tired legs was starting to feel it. For about the first half of the course you don't get near as much down hill as up hill, and sure enough at about 3.9mi there is a house with chickens running around in the road must be where we turn left! The second half of the course has hill after hill after hill but it has just as much down hill with the up hill which really helped us not to take 3hrs to finish the crazy thing!! We ended up walking up the hills and running down them as far as we could and walked completely the last 2mi. My legs were so sore I was so ready to be done! I know I wasn't ready by no means to tackle something like that but I am proud I had the courage to try!

While we was out there struggling to finish I made the statement" This is awful, if I had known it was going to be like this I probably wouldn't have signed up!" That nice encouraging Sarah said "No we will be there together and complete it together!" Thank You Sarah :) Now I know what I need to be training for HILLS!!! Which leaves me to ask.......

Have you EVER regretted signing up for a Race? Why? Did you Run it anyway? Any Good Advice on training for 21 large hills in 13 miles? (Oh yea and the course was way long, not sure of the exact ending location but all the way back to the car was 13.68mi)

5 comments:

Crystal said...

and you just sealed the deal on me NOT registering for this race! i had been going back and forth bc the medal and shirt look really cool. but hills i dont do!

Crystal said...

giveaway winner?? :)

Elle said...

I learned not to hate hills this past Fall when I started using the Chi Running technique.

Lean into the hill.
Use your arms to help you run up.
Take shorter strides.
If it is really steep use a side step to keep going ... sort of back and forth from one side to the other.

You can likely find it online or here is s post I did about it some time ago...

http://eatrunsail.blogspot.com/2011/09/hills-chi-way.html

Good luck!

Suz and Allan said...

I'm with Elle. That's great advice for hills!

Courtney said...

i'm kinda regretting signing up for this race too!! hills and i'm running the knoxville half the very next day. the main reason i was doing this one is that my friend wanted it to be her first, but now she has a stress fracture. bad bad bad!