Race Report for Swanzey Covered Bridges Half Marathon - Elijah’s Race

I’ve been looking forward to this race ever since I first found it on coolrunning.com.  The idea of running a scenic course, through 4 covered bridges, on a crisp early Fall New Hampshire morning sounded like fun.  Saturday morning I felt pretty good about this race.  My legs felt good, and I was just coming off of a light training week.  By the end of Saturday night though, I wasn’t sure how I was going to do.

Saturday night my wife and friends from work conspired to surprise me with a going away get together at Samuels Tavern at the Basketball Hall of Fame.  I had a great time and despite being excited about starting grad school this week, I was reminded of how much I’m going to miss seeing my friends at work all the time.  By the end of the night I had also enjoyed 8 pints of Guinness and thought to myself, “What the hell are you thinking?  You’ve got a race in a few hours.”  So, I started with my usual anti-hangover formula (Gatorade and 3 multi-vitamins) and hoped for the best.

We got up early, loaded the kids in car and headed North.  I felt better than I expected and decided that even though this race was just a training run for me, I was going to treat this as a true race.  This was going to be the best indicator for me to evaluate my marathon training progress and come up with some sort of guestimate of my eventual marathon time.

The race started at the Monadnock Regional High School in Swanzey, NH.  The race is called Elijah’s Race after Elijah Barrett.  Elijah started the race 5 years ago.  Sadly he died 2 years ago.  Today his parents were on hand to welcome the runners and to fire the starting pistol.  The race started with a short downhill to the first of the four covered bridges. After the first bridge we turned left onto the rail trail and ran for approximately 2 miles on the gravel/dirt path.  There has been a lot of rain lately, but the race director said that over the past week, they had dumped 25 tons of gravel on the path and had fixed most of the boggy bad parts.

By the end of the 5th mile we had run through 3 of the 4 covered bridges.  With the exception of a very short stretch along Route 10 the course was run on back roads.  Lots of rolling hills and gear changing.  The last of the covered bridges came in the 10th mile and from there it seemed that most of the terrain was down hill, back to the high school.  It was perfect running weather.  Sunny, dry air with a gentle breeze, and only 55 degrees at race start time.

As far as race strategy, I went out fast to get past the initial crowd of runners (first mile in 6:41) and then from there I quickly dialed it back to a pace I could sustain for the whole 13.1 miles.  By mile 4 I was averaging a 7:30 mile and that is where I kept it for the rest of the race.   I focused on my short rapid stride on the uphills and did my best to glide down the downhills.

I set a new PR today and beat my goal by about 6 minutes.  I was hoping for a 1:45, but ended up finishing in 1:39:10.  That was good enough for 59th out of 285.  I was very happy with my performance today.  April and the girls were at the finish line and McKenna was clapping like crazy, yelling her usual “Run faster Daddy!!!”

However, I now have a BIG problem.  You see, I’m training for the Cape Cod marathon on October 25th and the Cape is a Boston qualifier.  I’m 36 years old which means that I need a 3:15:59 for my BQ (Boston Qualifier) time.  Depending on which marathon predicting equation you use, that puts me somewhere between 3 and 14 minutes off of my needed BQ time.  If I had finished today in 1:50 and knew that there was no way in hell that I had any chance of meeting my BQ, I could just take it easy for the rest of this season and run a comfortable marathon on the Cape without any pressure, but now because I am so close I feel like I really have to step it up  with my training and run the race of my life in October.  Oh well, there are worse problems to have.

Here are some pictures from today including some of the kids playing in the playground while Daddy was off on his run. (Click to enlarge)

My going away cake from last night. Anesthesia School here I come.

Aubrey in playground

McKenna doing her thing

Final Stretch

Hi kids.

Me

Finish Line