2013 St. Paddy’s Day Dash & Bash

Recently I had the opportunity to travel to Greenville, SC, with my wife and daughter (Team Al) for the 2nd annual St. Paddy’s Day Dash & Bash 5K and 10K. There is nothing like starting off your running season with a St. Paddy’s day event. As I lined up at the 5K start on this sunny Spring day I plotted my strategy: slide past the girl wearing the viking helmet, get in front of the guys in the tutus, watch out for the masked woman wearing a cape and try to keep the man in the Gumby costume in sight. It was that kind of race. It was my kind of race.

Milling about the starting line warming up I had a zen moment. I jogged past a man walking with his daughter. She looked about nine years old to me. I heard him say, “You want to try and run the whole way?” She said, “sure.” Then a few minutes later as I was stretching at a lamppost I heard a group of 20-something couples greeting each other. One woman asked the other, “you going to try and run the whole race?” The reply was, “I don’t know.” Guess some things really don’t change.

On a more serious note, I’ve learned to approach every event with several goals. I find this approach good for my mental health. You almost always accomplish several goals. You feel better about any goals you can’t quite nail this time around. You get a better feel for the range of your accomplishments. This is especially helpful if you like me sometimes get all up in your sport and set unrealistic goals.

Mandatory Goals: Make it to the start line. Sometimes the hardest and almost always the most decisive goal. Avoided being airlifted out to a hospital. This goal is heavily endorsed by management also known as my long-suffering wife.

Performance Goals: Stay in heart rate zone two for most if not all of the race. It’s early in the season and I need to look at this race as a training run. I’m allowed to knock on the door of zone three but not to kick it in. The minor modification to this goal is finish line. I get a little squirrely (mildly insane) when the finish line comes into view. For some reason, the difference between finishing 949th or 950th actually matters at that point.

Unrealistic Goal: The goal that eluded me since I got up off the couch in 2009: finish a 5K under 30 minutes. Since it conflicts with just about every other goal for this race it is not really in contention here. But the sub-30 minute 5K is pretty and shiny and will someday be mine, insert maniacal laughter here.

The Dash & Bash 5K course is basically a lollipop with a curlicue at the bottom of the stick through downtown Greenville. The curlicue is necessary because the route goes around Fluor Field, then into the stadium, around the warning track to the finish line at home plate. Pretty cool. There are three significant climbs with longest being between mile two and mile three. We were lucky to have an amazing clear and cool spring day for this exercise in dressing inappropriately while exercising.

Running a 5K while trying to stay in zone 2 was an education. I had to slow to a walk several times on hills to lower my heart rate. This hurt my feelings more than a little. My new fascination with heart rate zones comes from reading Total Heart Rate Training by Joe Friel. It turns out that most self-coached endurance athletes train too hard too often. Talk about counterintuitive.

As I understand it, you want to train in zone 2 and zone 4 and avoid zone 3 as much as possible. The trick I’m told is to keep the easy workouts easy and make the hard workouts hard. Really it is about matching workout and recovery and maintaining an appropriate level of exercise stress throughout the training cycle. If it all blends together into a hairball progress will come to a standstill. I’ll have a review of Friel’s book once I finish reading it.

So I’m running through downtown Greenville trying to have a good time, run the best race I can and not sabotage my training all at the same time. Not only do I have to slow or walk on hills but I have to let other people pass me. Granted people pass me all the time so it shouldn’t be a big deal. I guess it’s all about how fast you think you are or how fast you think you should be. If someone older or larger or less coordinated than you goes bopping past, you want to pick up the pace. You just know you should be able to beat them to the finish line.

I was passed by older runners, kids, parents running with kids, women pushing strollers. I lost track of Gumby and don’t know but suspect he finished ahead of me.

Late in the race coming back up Main Street, passing the night spots and restaurants with Fluor Field almost in sight I was passed by a three-toed sloth. He or she was wearing a Greenville Zoo t-shirt and making good time. I have no idea if he was out on a day pass or just visiting relatives in the area. I thought the green feather boa was a bit much but hey it’s St. Paddy’s. World’s slowest land mammal my sweet aunt Fanny.

It was a beautiful day and a well-organized race for good causes. The Dash & Bash gave me a chance to get out there and kickstart my racing season. It was joyous to be out pounding the pavement with several hundred other runners and a great beginning to what I hope will be a good year of endurance sports fun.

I did pretty well on most of my goals. My average heart rate for the race was 131. I did bolt for the finish line giving me a peak heart rate of 154. That’s pretty good for me I have hit 170+ bpm crossing some finish lines. Early on I just pushed too hard. I had something to prove and didn’t realize just how much I was setting myself back. From now on we train to go forward, boys and girls, not backward.

After the race I found the local Subway and got a steak, egg and cheese flatbread. My wife was still working as a race volunteer and my daughter was in the hotel room doing homework so I had some time on my own. I walked over to Falls Park on the Reedy, and checked out the Liberty Bridge, a pedestrian suspension bridge that crosses the river. I sat in a small amphitheater, eating my sandwich and watched a young woman do impossible things with a hula hoop. A young man walked up to her and asked if he could video her. She said sure. I sat there thinking about how much life and technology has changed in the 50 or so years I’ve been stumbling around. I also wondered if anything could be better than sitting in a park on the warm spring day eating breakfast after a race.

This was my first trip to Greenville in many years. I used to go there all the time a million years ago when I wrote about the textile industry. I have to say that I was surprised at just how impressed I was with the city. Dogs and bicycles were everywhere. We had absolutely no trouble finding MSG-free restaurants. We even found a barbeque restaurant that was MSG-free. The food was fabulous. The people were friendly. The shops were full of wonderful, beautiful things that I want but don’t really need. It was a beautiful weekend after what seemed like a long cold winter indeed.