GAG -Erlebnis Halb-Marathon

So, clearly GAG is an acronym, but i still find it very amusing to pair it with anything athletic. Especially something endurance related. As a result, I ran the first five kilometers expecting michael hutchence to hop along beside me with his pants around his ankles.

Okay, on to the good stuff.

Yesterday's Run: 13.1 miles
Place: Köln Mülheim
Time: 1:48.42
Overall Impression: Very Good But A Bit Painful (VGBABP)

This is where the Kenyan Method really got put to the test.
Using all the scientific knowledge of a humanist (i put the wissenschaft in geisteswissenschaft, baby), I thought I would conduct an experiment by replacing beer and cake with whole grain noodles, bananas, and lots of water.
Here we go:

Hypothesis: We might be wrong about Kenyan training habits.

Experiment/Test: See if "Good" food is really "good for you" by eating said food instead of yummy drunky stuff.

The Result: My average per mile dropped from last week's 8.78 minutes to this week's 8.28 minutes. In other words, half a minute faster.

Conclusion: Kenyans put steroids in their beer. And Human Growth Hormone.


The thing I love about races is how early they are. For example, as I walked to my subway stop, I passed a bar that was still clearly open from the night before. At 7:45 am, these people still thought it was saturday night, and i felt decidedly underdressed. (this was alleviated when i actually arrived at the start and realized, among a sea of asics tank tops and funny little hats, one can never be underdressed at a race.) Mostly though, I spent the train ride wondering how many conditions would need to be met for me to stay up until 7 AM drinking, and concluded they all involved me sneaking home to take a five hour nap around 2 AM.
So when I got there, I lined up in the "slower than 1:50 group" because my unofficial goal was 2 hrs flat. Really, I just wanted to finish, but I was cautiously optimistic.
At the gun, it was your typical anarchy. Everyone forgets they have chips and decide they need to cross the line quick...and by quick they mean now.
I knew I was running fast early, and I knew the adrenaline was carrying me. In fact, I was telling myself by the third kilometer that "I'll learn from this." and "This is why we run these things, to make mistakes when they don't count." I wasn't sure how to record my splits because of the ridiculous metric system which means nothing to me. I simply have no spatial/time comprehension of a kilometer.(Every time I say this to Tessa's grandmother, she sighs, and sits me down. Then she tells me that there are one hundred centimeters in a meter. And one hundred meters in a kilometer. She explains this patiently, like she were talking to a particularly astute piece of balsa wood.) I finally decided to focus on 5K splits, since the beer ads told me that there were 21K in a half marathon, and 5K is the only useful distance for americans, besides 10K.
My first split came in around 25 minutes, which is pretty fast for me. I got nervous, and started to hypreventilate. Then I basically decided I could keep riding the adrenaline a little further and then slow down to a halfway normal pace. I also say my first cow of the day.

By 10K my legs were numb. I had found someone with whom I decided to keep pace by following the logic of, "Hey, his calves are roughly the same size as mine!" He apparently decided the same thing, since we spent a lot of time drafting for each other. Second split was just over 26 minutes. I don't remember any cows for this part.

At 15K I was less than happy, but I found a particularly good stretch of my ipod that seamlessly blended the raconteurs, belle and sebastian, and michael jackson's "PYT". Good times were had by all. I finally stopped to pee near a scary cow, and resigned myself to crawling the rest of the way. Third split was about 26:45

At 20K Belle and Sebastian's "Get Me Away From Here I'm Dying" came on. I wish I made that up. I was able to laugh in appreciation, but it ended up being the one song I skipped. At this point I realized that I was going to finish in under 1:50, so I'd say I was happy, if feelings could be felt through a haze of unconsciousness. Fourth Split: 24:45ish (I crawl faster than I run.)

By the finish, I was pretty beat, so there were no handstands or anything. I envisioned a mad sprint, but once I saw my time, I felt no need. Which was good, because I was crippled. I was pretty ecstatic though. For frame of reference to the H.S.H. (Hayes Street Haters), my time in Sonoma was 1:49:45 for twelve miles. I basically ran a mile further than I did then in a minute's less time. This is by far my best distance run, which is mostly attributable to race day superpowers, sure. I don't expect to carry that pace for a full marathon, but it is encouraging for a roughly 4 hour finish.

Tessa asked me afterwards how much further I could go at that pace, and I somewhat conservatively told her "five feet". In retrospect that wasn't fair. I'm pretty sure now I could have managed ten.