Race Report: East Haddam 10.5-Miler

I had never actually been to Moodus, CT before yesterday, but I found out quickly that there are a lot of hills there!  Very picturesque farmland, countryside scenery, but lots of up and downs on the roads.  The scenic 10.5-mile course was essentially comprised of nothing but rolling hills from beginning to end.  I was pretty excited to discover this since this would be an excellent tune-up effort for Boston, just two weeks away.

As I looked behind me at the starting line I could see that the field was small...probably less than 200 runners for both the 5K and the 10.5-miler, and it was a safe bet that the majority of the field had opted for the shorter race because half of the runners appeared to be high-school age or younger.  This was a bit of a bummer...although an easy victory is nice, of course, there would be precious little incentive to truly push myself if there was no real competition.

But I got lucky!  At the point where the 5K runners and 10.5-milers break off from each other (about 1 mile into the race) one of the high schoolers, about 50 meters ahead of me, surprisingly took the 10.5 mile route and the chase was on!  I assumed that this would be a classic battle between a young upstart and a cagey veteran and that this guy had gone out much too fast for his own good and would bonk at some point, so I put in an extra effort to keep him within striking range and wait for him to finally slow down. 

And I waited.  And waited.  When I checked my watch at 5 miles I saw that I was averaging 5:50 per mile on a very hilly course with 5.5 miles to go and the guy ahead of me was starting to pull away!  At the 6-mile mark I mentally conceded the race to him since we was still pulling away and I was afraid that if I kept up this pace much longer I would be lucky to even reach the finish line!  So I let him go and downshifted into survival mode, no longer concerned with catching anyone but more focused on not allowing anyone to catch me.  A footnote: after the race, I discovered that the winner was actually 20 years old...a very young-looking college student and not a high schooler as I had assumed. 

I got a mental boost when Amy and the kids pulled up alongside me in the minivan around mile 8 and coasted with me.  The kids were cheering their heads off and Amy had slipped a Dave Matthews Band disc into the minivan's player and blasted "Warehouse"...my favorite DMB tune!  That was more than enough to keep my spirits and my pace up for the last couple of miles.

So I finished in 2nd place overall with a 1:05:11, which translates into a 6:12 pace which I was delighted with considering the difficulty of the course and the stubborn chest cold which has still not completely disappeared.  So things are looking relatively good heading into Boston!

One more note: there was a kids' race for 6 and under during the adult race.  Owen, my five year-old finished somewhere in the middle of the pack despite cutting the course in dramatic fashion, a ritual he has eagerly adopted since running the kids' races that the Town of Glastonbury holds during the summer.  Shane, my two-year old, and the shortest runner in the field by far, finished dead-last yet he was absolutely delighted with the experience, smiling and laughing from start to finish.  In fact, he was so far behind the rest of the field that the organizers had plenty of time to reset the tape that they hold across the finish line for the winner and he had the thrill of breaking the tape as the crowd cheered wildly.  So, all in all, not a bad day at the races for the Keenan clan!