Ran Gainesville's Newnan's Lake 15K Race This Morning

After missing out on the Ocala Half-Marathon last week, I was looking forward to quickly bouncing back with my running by participating in Gainesville's Newnan's Lake 15K this morning.   My intention was simple with this race: go out and run the 9.3-mile course like it's a regular training run.  Of course, that strategy usually lasts just a few miles into the race before I get overcome with competition fever.  But this morning, at least for a little while, I was content with just going my usual pace, which hovers around nine minutes per mile...

When I first pulled into the race site's crowded parking lot (a park with a ramp for fishing boats into Newnan's Lake), the temperature had spiked downward for this race day and was around 37.  However, I was fortunate to find the last available space in the paved lot, which also happened to be about twenty feet from the starting line.  After registering for the race, I returned to the car and bundled up until just before race time at 8:30.  I stood near the front of the crowd, which the announcer claimed was a record, approaching 400 entrants.  I've stood near the rear at the start of  some previous races and have had a lot of difficulty trying to pass by excessively slow runners (and a few walkers), so I thought the passing would be kept to a minimum this way.  But during the first few minutes after the race started, it was other runners passing me...by the droves.  I began to wonder if maybe I wasn't in good enough shape to run this race.  As it turned out, after about three miles or so, I found myself in the midst of a number of runners who kept with my pace.  But at about that same time I began to experience some cramping on my right side, and I wondered whether it would worsen.  Fortunately, it didn't, but the pain still lingered on for a few miles.  I kept pushing on, not wanting to fade within my own group, and thinking that this just wasn't my day.  But I managed to hold on and finish the race, with a couple of runners passing me at the end and me passing another.  When I saw my final finishing time, I had to do a double take.  At my usual pace, I had been anticipating something around 1 hour, 23 minutes, but I felt as if it would be slower.  Instead, though, my final time was 1:18:21.  I'd been burning it up all along!  Which goes to show you that you can't always tell how well you're doing by comparing yourself to the runners around you or by how you physically feel during the race.  Gainesville is packed with talented, fast, and yes, fanatical long-distance runners...it's easy to come down with an inferiority complex in the middle of a race with them.  I finished seventh in my age group (55-59), so there was no point in hanging around the area for award time.

I liked the course for this race, which in places bordered on the swampy part of Newnan's Lake, but mostly went down woodsy roads or by a few houses in this sparsely populated area a few miles east of Gainesville.  Once the race had finally begun and I was running, the weather stopped being a factor and once again I wondered how some of the overdressed runners around me were able to withstand it.

My recovery from the run seems to be going very well, and I was able to close out the month of January, 2015 with a total running mileage of 342.  I ran on every day of the month, and my longest single run was 10.2 miles. On one day, though, I managed to accumulate 20 miles through multiple runs.

In a couple of weeks, Gainesville will hold the FivePoints Marathon/Half-Marathon race.  I still want to participate in it, but will definitely stick with the half-marathon event.  Also, having learned my lesson from the Ocala Half-Marathon, I plan to wait until the very last minute to sign up for it..