Bay cafe 5K Race Report

OK, so I know I said I would post my race report on Monday afternoon, but I wanted to have the pictures I took ready to go along with the report and that just didn’t work out until last night. By the time I got the pictures downloaded to Annie’s computer (I was using her camera because my old Kodak died last year and I have yet to buy a new one…but Christmas and my birthday are just around the corner!), put them on my USB key and got back to my apartment and looked at them, it was 11 o’clock and I just didn’t want to start a race report at that point. So here I am, freshly back from lunch and at work once again wasting time.

OK, so let us begin. For my own completely biased back-story on the Bay Café, please see the previous posts. If you are a big fan of the Bay Café, please try to get out of Baltimore and go to a real bar soon. Better yet, go to Aruba and go to a real beachside bar. You’ll thank me later when you realize Bay Café sucks.

ANYWAY, the race was scheduled to begin at 8:30, so I woke up about 7:00 and got my stuff on and double-checked that I had everything I could possibly need. I decided to leave my mutli-tool and sleeping bag at home since I was only going 3.1 miles and there was little chance of getting lost in the wilderness of Fells Point. However I did take my axe to cut firewood, just in case. It was absolutely perfect outside. I’d say it was about 70 degrees and sunny without much humidity. Perfect.

Even though Annie had to work for the day on Monday, she agreed to get up and take my picture and send me off, which I appreciated. I got over to the course by about 8 AM and was surprised that it wasn’t more crowded. I really thought that there’d be more people running in this race since it’s, more or less, the beginning of race season. Anyway, I parked really close to the starting line and was able to walk about.25 mile and then run a little bit to warm up my legs. I know many experts say you should run about a mile to properly warm up before a race, but I don’t think that applies to a 3-mile race. And yes, I am totally as knowledgeable as Boston marathon winners after having run two 5K’s. But seriously, why would you bother running 30% of the actual race distance before the race? The only circumstance I could see where that would be efficient would be if you had a real chance to win. Then you’ll need your legs in peak form as soon as the race begins. I think it’s safe to say that I was under no illusions about my chances in this race.

So I was relatively warmed up as 8:25 rolled around. I was just hanging out in the Bay Café parking lot and started following people as they moved towards some random spot on Boston Street. I got in the back because, again, I’m not delusional, and waited…and waited. 8:30 comes and no horn. Then the crowd starts moving backwards and it’s obvious that the people in the front had no idea where the starting line was. Nice job. So we move back about 100 feet and wait…and wait. Finally about 8:35 the horn sounds and we’re off. It’s crowded at the beginning, of course, but not too bad. It thinned out as we continued south on Boston Street. At Clinton St, I hit the turnaround and headed back towards the Bay Café, going north on Boston. This was the main length of the race, as we passed the café and headed up towards Harbor South, close to where the new Legg Mason building is being built, along with the Four Seasons. At this point I was somewhat in a good rhythm.

By starting at the back, I was able to start out slow and assess how my body felt without feeling the pressure to speed up beyond my comfort zone. By the time I hit the turnaround, I was feeling good, but was conscious of speeding up too much. I wanted to have something left for the last quarter mile sprint to the finish. As I approached the turnaround I was slowly passing people. Some were huffing and puffing while others had probably just been further towards the front of the pack to begin with. Anyway, I was happy that I passed a fair number of people while only being passed myself a few times.

We made a wide turn as we hit Fleet St, running on Fleet, then Ann, then Aliceanna before coming back to Boston to head south towards the finish line. About .30 of a mile from the finish, I noticed a guy running on front of me who was wearing a Terps hat. Well, as you can see from my picture, my killer WVU hat that I bought for $7 at the Martinsburg, WV Wal-Mart is my racing hat. I couldn’t’ let the guy in the Terps hat beat me so I sped up and passed him as I ran hard to the finish line. My final time was 27:17 according to my watch. The “official” time was 27:29 but that’s BS because I didn’t cross the start line for those extra 12 seconds at the beginning of the race. So I beat my previous time by about 2 minutes! I was pretty pleased with that improvement in just a little over a month.

So, out of the total field of 377 runners, I came in at…243rd. Awesome, I know. That means 64% of the field finished before me and only 34% finished after me. However, while I attribute the majority of this stellar performance to my still improving fitness level, I have several other explanations as well, to wit:

- The course was flat and fast, which helped me, but also helped the more experienced runners more. As a result, better runners ran much better times and I’d be willing to bet there were a good number of PR’s made yesterday as a result.

- The race was also the Maryland Road Runners Club of America Championship so while there were plenty of slow pokes like myself, there were many more runners there with some serious kicks. Moreover, they were really actually racing, whereas I was racing my imaginary Kenyan competitor (I won, of course).

- Because this race was the MRRCA championship, it kept lots of more casual runners away than normally would have run in the race. So there weren’t as many people of my own skill level running. Quite the opposite, I would say.

- My unusually large and dense brain that has been referred to as “the organic supercomputer” slowed me down.

- The barometric pressure from Hurricane Felix played havoc with my lactate levels.

OK, so two of those reasons are false. But seriously, I have unusually dense brain matter.

Seriously, even though I got seriously burned on Monday (only 3 other men in my age group finished behind me out of a total 49!), I did improve my race time by 2 minutes (let’s say about 1:10 taking the fast course into account?), which was my goal all along. If I can shave another minute off that time by the end of the month, I’ll be very pleased. Constant improvement, that’s the key to this whole thing, I feel.

So, overall a good experience. I’m glad I did it and am really looking forward to the Great Strides Against Prostate Cancer 5K at the end of the month. In the meantime, enjoy my super awesome pictures.