When I stepped onto the Notre Dame Golf Course on Friday, my heart sank. The wind was howling across the flat ground, and the scattered trees seemed to offer little protection against the "breeze," which, according to the weather forecast, averaged over 20 mph at its peak around 2 or 3 in the afternoon (the time of the meet). Although I knew that the course was almost perfectly flat, I decided to back off of my original race plan, especially in the first mile. It had been a long time since I had run in winds that strong, and I wasn't sure how to deal with it or even how much it would affect me. Seeing the likes of Ryen Frazier and Molly Seidel come through the first mile of the DI race in 5:25 (a pretty relaxed pace for runners of their caliber) convinced me that a conservative strategy would probably serve me well.
Before I went to warm up for my race, I reached for the race program we had picked up at the race tent. Flipping through it, I noticed a list of past winners, and one name in particular caught my eye-- my coach, Sam Bair, won the meet in both 1966 and 1967! My dad and I decided that this was a good omen.
As the start of the race drew closer, I did my usual warmup and headed to the line, where I squeezed into a box with a couple of other unattached runners from various places. The boxes were not specifically assigned in the open race, so many of them had already been claimed by whole teams. Luckily, the ladies in box 16 (including the eventual winner, Rebecca Tracy) were nice enough to let me have a place on the starting line with them.
When the gun went off, a good number of women went sprinting off the line as the men in the race surged forward at a pace I knew I would not be able to hold. I decided to tuck into the middle of the pack, and I came through the mile in around 5:38, which put me well over 50 meters behind the leaders of the women's race. I started to move up throughout the second mile, which winds in a figure eight throughout the golf course, and with a mile to go, I felt strong and confident. In retrospect, I wish that I had picked it up a little bit more in the middle two kilometers of the race, but at the time I was still concerned about the direct headwind on the "backstretch" of the course from around 2.25 miles to about the 2.85-mile mark. By the 2-mile mark, the crowd from the start had dissipated significantly, and without the cover of other runners, I was starting to feel each gust like a hill that I had to climb.
During the last mile, I began to steadily increase my perceived pace, but until nearly the 4K mark, I had no idea that I was closing in on the women's frontrunners. There were some men from the back of the pack mixed in with the top women in the race, which made it difficult to pick out where I was relative to the other ladies. When I realized that first and second place were only about 7 seconds ahead, I got a surge of adrenaline and I decided to go for it. I caught the leaders with around 200m to go, but despite my efforts, Rebecca Tracy got the better of me in the final meters of the race with her lightning-fast kick.
After the race, I felt satisfied with the way my race strategy panned out overall, but deep down I knew that I had saved up a little too much energy in the middle of the race and that I hadn't quite "left it all on the course." It's hard not to get frustrated with myself for being overly timid, but when I do, I try to remember that each race this season is a small stepping-stone on the way to Van Cortlandt (and hopefully Balboa Park).
It's going to take a while for me to
shake off the remnants of my 2014 cross country season; every time I put on my
spikes, I can't help remembering the humiliation of struggling to the finish
line at Footlocker in dead last place. With that race in mind, it's easier to
appreciate the benefits of a conservative race plan-- you might not run a
perfect race the first time out, but you won't have a disastrous result,
either. This season, for me, is all about applying the lessons of last year and
progressing a little bit further with each race so that I can discover my
limits... without first exceeding them, that is.
