Amy’s run it for a few years now as I’ve watched dutifully from the sidelines, but this year was my first Road to the Pogue. I’ve been eagerly waiting for today like you might for a new toy to arrive in the mail, which is weird, but true. In the last few weeks I had begun searching out some steeper trail runs to expose myself to things I’d encounter on the course. The edges frayed a little last week as I tried to tackle too much by Wednesday. So I skipped our Thursday evening cross training session and did a light run on Saturday where I still found myself tired. Maybe it was allergies too. This past week, on Tuesday I did a brisk bike ride with my co-worker and a pretty intense cross train on Thursday. Less overall activity than normal, but a lot less than the week before. I hoped the time off would be enough to make me feel good today without damaging any gains I’ve been making.

A big yellow bus dropped us off in a parking lot near the start. The actual start is 3-400 yards in to the park, up a nice incline. Amy and I mixed a fast walk and jog to warm up the body on the way up. We’d been standing in a slight drizzle for 20 minutes waiting at the other end for the bus, and we were on the last bus so there wouldn’t be time for warming up otherwise. The race starts off climbing immediately, which concerned me a little bit since it can usually take me a while to settle in. If I wanted to push myself I’d need a chance to get warm first. The approach was all we had time for.

Before long we began to hear the collective chatter of 300 people above, somewhere in the trees. In the last week, the leaves have exploded to create an unfamiliar veil in the woods. Then suddenly we saw everyone lined up in a relatively flat area on the trail. We settled in to the 10:00 mile section and waited only a few minutes for the gun to go off.

I’m embarrassed to say that my adrenaline set me off at a faster pace than I had otherwise planned on, but I felt good, so I went with it – passing gobs of people as I climbed. The beginning of a race is always a cluster F. It’s like being on a highway during rush hour. You have to pick your spots and work the soft shoulder to make progress. Scaling back my week really seemed to be paying off though. Things leveled out at The Pogue and I had a moment to composed myself, still making gains, breathing easily. A woman asked me if I knew our pace and I did not. She said she knew it was too fast, but wanted to know how far over she was. I responded with some form of support. Then as we come around the western banks of the pond, the trail begins climbing again for the peak, the point at which Amy had warned me the going gets tough. And she was right. It’s then that I started suffering, but I continued reeling folks in and continued a running pace. My plan had been to exhaust myself by the peak and coast down the hill to the end, but I spent it a little more quickly than that and at mile 3 I was questioning myself. Could I maintain? I took opportunities to rest where possible and slowed a bit. What the map doesn’t really convey is that as you retrace your steps over the 4 mile marker, coming off the peak, you are again climbing before the 1.8 miles to the bottom. So it’s not quite all over when you hit the top.

Also, turns out coasting down the final hill requires a bit more effort than I had thought, but the competitive urge to pass people kept me going, faster and faster as I descended. I recognized some people who attend all the local races and realized…. these are people who normally do pretty respectably (in my opinion). A man sprinted by me when we still had 200-300 yards left, then slowed enough for me to respond. So I passed him on the shoulder and accelerated. I could hear him behind me and that’s when the runner’s high kicked in. My head tingled, my body got light, and I ran faster. We raced to the finish and he stayed behind, with a congrats to each other at the end.

By my description you’d think I won the whole event. Nah – 113 out of 349. But I’m proud of my pace on a challenging course and the fact that I was somewhere near the top third, considering I don’t think of myself as a runner. It does look like I’m in the bottom half of my division though. So there’s room to improve. I’d like to break into the top 100 and the top half of my division next year. Next year I may start the race further up in the group. Having no prior experience, I didn’t want to overestimate and put myself in a group of people who saw me as a road block.

I haven’t participated in many organized events so it’s not like I have a long and rich history of chill participation, but normally I’m cool to just go out and participate since there’s no way I’m going to come anywhere close to winning. This time it wasn’t enough to simply do it. As much as I talked about that being enough before the race, once I was there I wanted to compete. 🙂

There’s another trail race tomorrow in Hanover. I might do it as a way to shake up the muscles if I feel like it. The event is part of a series that I hope to partake of as the summer progresses. Some of them I’ll skip, just because I don’t feel like driving that far. But I do hope to wrap things up with the Farnum Five.