04.08.23
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Race Report: Purity Moosic City Dairy Dash 5k – April 9, 2022

It has been awhile since I last posted!

After the Rock n Roll half in 2016, I cut back on running. Then in 2017, I got married, got pregnant, and stopped running completely. I gave birth to a beautiful baby in 2018 and tried to start back, but it was hard to find time. So I didn’t manage to get back into it until summer 2021. After I had stuck with it for six months and was starting to get more stamina, I decided I needed to sign up for a race to keep my motivation up, so I chose the Dairy Dash because it was familiar, flat and about four months away, which was the time period I was looking for.

My training was going pretty well until the beginning of March, when an SUV slammed into the side of my car. I was okay, just really bruised, but a took a couple weeks off from running because I was so sore, and I lost fitness really fast. So I did not have high hopes for this race and felt a little disheartened and not excited about it at all.

My original goal (before the accident) was to run it in under 35 minutes. My training had put me on pace for around 11 minute miles, maybe a little faster; not nearly the pace I was running 6-7 years ago, but decent enough for the progress I had been making. However, after the accident, I was struggling to run 12 minute miles and couldn’t even make 2 miles without walking, so my goal for the race changed to try to run for at least two miles before walking and I threw out any time goals.

Race Day

I had set my alarm for 6am, but my cats woke me at 4am and my kid woke me at 5am, so I was already awake when the alarm went off. It was chilly that morning, so I had decided to wear a long sleeved shirt with leggings. I actually wore the race shirt I had picked up the day before at packet pickup, which I never do, but it was a little looser than my other long sleeve tops and I wanted the airflow. I ate half a bagel with cream cheese and headed out.

I remembered the race being pretty well marked with signs, so I didn’t pay too much attention to the email on where to park. However, when I arrived in Metrocenter, I didn’t see any signs. I turned down a road and then another and suddenly saw a crowd of people running toward my car. I had accidentally turned onto the race route and the one mile run had started! I quickly did a U-turn, doubled back, then pulled into a parking lot to actually read the email. I finally found parking, then headed into the crowd to find my sister-in-law, Stefanie, and her friend Jenn, who were also running.

I had grabbed their packets the day before as well, so I delivered their shirts and bibs. Once we were all ready, we joined the crowd at the start line, choosing a spot in the middle. Soon we were off.

Mile 1: 11:09
My goal in the beginning was to just try to find a good pace that didn’t feel strenuous. I got into a pretty good groove pretty quickly, once I got around the walkers that had started too close to the front. I checked my watch around half a mile in and I was pacing around 11:10/mi. I thought maybe that was a bit too fast just based on how the last couple weeks had gone, but I was feeling good, so I didn’t slow down.

Mile 2: 10:57
Soon after the start of the second mile, there is a turnaround point. I kept an eye out and waved to Stefanie and Jenn when I ran by them. They were running together and a couple minutes behind me at that point. I continued on. I knew there was a water stop around the end of the second mile, so my plan was to try to make it to the water stop before walking, although I still was feeling pretty good. I was starting to get a little hot in my long sleeves, so I pushed them up my arms. I marveled at the folks running in full winter gear; I get extremely hot when I run. It was in the mid-40s, which is my deciding line between long sleeves and short sleeves depending on how sunny it is.

Soon I could see the water stop in the distance. I ran to it without issue, grabbed a cup, took a few walking steps while I sipped, then immediately started running again. I was feeling good.

Mile 3: 10:56
After the water stop, there was another turnaround point. When I got to the water stop again, I considered getting more water, but decided I didn’t need it and continued on without stopping. Again, I kept an eye out for Stephanie and Jenn. They had slowed a bit, but I found them around seven minutes behind me and waved. As I neared the turn that would head to the finish line, I checked my watch again and was pleasantly surprised to see I was running under 11 min/mi. I passed the mile 9 marker for the 15k, so I knew I had 0.3 mi to go. I kept watching for the mile 6 marker for the 10k, but never saw one.

Final 0.1 (0.17 to my Garmin): 1:44 (10:06 pace)
The finish line was right in front of me at this point. I had paced pretty well, so I didn’t have a ton of kick, but I pushed with what I had and crossed the finish line.

Official Time: 34:36

I stopped my watch, accepted the finishers medal, and grabbed a water. Then I checked my time. I was amazed! I had done it in less than 35 minutes after all and without any walk breaks! I could not have been more elated.

I waited for Stephanie and Jenn to finish as well, cheering them on as they neared the end.

Race Review

This race is always well organized. The tech shirt was nice, and I always appreciate a medal! The best part is the food afterwards. They provided mac and cheese, doughnuts, bananas, a variety of ice cream, water, chocolate milk, and more. It was too cold for me for ice cream this year, so I just opted for a doughnut and chocolate milk. Yum!

My only complaint this year was the parking signage, as it was non-existent, and I’m a little concerned that they let me drive down the route after a race had started, haha.

Overall, a good race for my first one in nearly six years!

05.30.16
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Rock ‘n’ Roll Nashville Half Marathon – April 30, 2016

Going into this race, I kept my expectations low. I hadn’t trained well or often. Most of the training period had consisted of IT band issues on my side and ankle issues on Jonathan’s side, with an added dose of insomnia. I knew Jonathan would be fine, but I was disappointed that his first half marathon experience would include probably a lot of walking because of my lack of training.

However, we said we would just do it for fun, not care about our time, and just do whatever I felt like I could. My only real goal was to not get a personal worst, which just meant beating my Walt Disney World Half time of 3:07.

Race Day

We left the house around 6am for the 7am race start. This soon proved (we thought) to be a bad decision because traffic was terrible to get to the race. We didn’t get to park until after 7:00. It was pouring rain as we walked from parking at the stadium into downtown.

We knew we would have a little time before our corral (19) left, so we had a final bathroom break before heading up to the start line. Apparently, there had been lightning in the area, so when we finally arrived close to 7:30, the race hadn’t even started yet. Jonathan took this opportunity to stretch, and I just hung out looking awesome in my trash bag. It had stopped raining at this point.

trash bag couture

Miles 1-3: 12:14, 12:30, 13:25
My strategy to start out was to run flats and downhills and walk the uphills (and water stops). I was feeling pretty comfortable with this strategy, wanting to make sure I conserved some energy for the end, and hills are what had been giving me problems in training over the last couple months. Jonathan stopped for a quick bathroom break on mile 3.

starting the 2016 rock n roll nashville half marathon

Miles 4-6: 10:45, 11:18, 11:10
Soon after the start of mile 4, I ate my first lemonade Huma gel. This felt like it gave me some good energy (caffeine buzz?) and so the next three miles were pretty good. I even ran up some hills. It also helped that these miles are my favorite of the race, running through the Belmont area with all the spectators giving out high fives and cheering you on.

Miles 7-9: 12:22, 13:02, 12:55
The next few miles were hillier and a little tougher. I trudged on but my stomach was starting to feel a little funny. I thought maybe I was hungry again, so I ate my second gel. This turned out to be not such a great idea. My stomach went from just a little rumbly and full on pain.

Miles 10-13: 14:35, 18:48, 16:22, 15:34
We started walking a lot from that point on because I felt like I was going to throw up whenever I ran. On mile 11, I took a bathroom break, but it only moderately helped. We ran a few times, but most of this stretch was just walking and trying to finish. If Jonathan hadn’t been with me (and I hadn’t wanted that medal so bad!), I probably would have called it quits at this point. I was in a ton of pain.

Final 0.1 (0.31 to my watch): 2:57 (9:36 pace)
The course had changed a little this year (at least compared to two years ago) and the ending had a lot more hills than before! Not cool! After we topped the last one, we started to run into the finish. My stomach felt okay, and I was able to finish well.

finishing the 2016 rock n roll nashville half marathon

Official Time: 2:57:53

I did finish ten minutes ahead of my PW time, which is all I really wanted to do, so I can’t complain much, although I wish Jonathan’s first half marathon experience could have been better (he says he still had fun, even though I made him walk a ton). I do wish I could have prevented the stomach issues, but I still have no idea what happened. It hurt for the rest of the day, even just lying on the couch.

I was happy with the stretch of miles through Belmont. Too bad I couldn’t have kept that momentum up.

at the finish line of the 2016 rock n roll nashville half marathon

The race had a decent spread of food at the end, though, for once, I didn’t have much of an appetite. I ate a few pretzels and drank some chocolate milk. We didn’t hang out too long, as it was starting to rain again.

I do love the medal. 🙂 It is my new favorite.

02.18.16
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Race Report: Hot Chocolate 15k – February 13, 2016

Hot Chocolate is the only race I’ve run consistently every year since I started running. (Links to the 2014 Nashville Hot Chocolate 15k and 2015 Nashville Hot Chocolate 15k.) It’s usually a fairly good predictor of how well I will do at whatever end-of-April half marathon I’m running (in 2014, my half pace was a little faster, and last year my pace was a little slower, but they were close). So it’s kind of like a goal pace long run.

However, I haven’t quite figured out what my half goal pace is this year, so my plan for this race was as follows: I wanted to average about a 10:30 pace, which is faster than I’ve been doing my long runs. I wanted to accomplish this by doing the first 5k at a fairly comfortable pace (11:00ish pace), the next 5k around 10:30, and the final 5k with everything I had left (aiming for around 10:00 pace).

The weather was forecast to be pretty similar to how it was in 2014: high teens with a wind chill in the low teens and sunny. Brr!

Race Day

I arrived downtown around 6:30am, but I didn’t head up to the race site until 6:45 or so. I was supposed to meet my cousin Gillian in Corral D (I had been placed in B, but was moving back to run with her), but it was chaotic, everyone looked the same (like ninjas), and she had put her phone in her bag at bag check, so I wasn’t able to find her before we started.

I had worn one of my old ballet warmup sweaters over my race stuff that I was going to throw away anyway because it had a huge rip down the side seam. It did its job to keep me warm and I threw it to the side right before the start.

Mile 1: 10:59
Mile 2: 10:59
Mile 3: 10:21
The race started off okay. I was slightly annoyed at the start because there were already walkers in the way (the first few corrals clearly say NO WALKERS!) that didn’t know race etiquette and you had to weave around. This is probably why my watch distance ran so long in the end.

The second mile has the giant hill that I hate every year. I made it up, but it seemed like a lot of people were struggling already.

The 5k people split from the 15k people during the third mile, so the course got much less congested and it was easier to run. Hence my little pick up in pace.

Mile 4: 10:28
Mile 5: 10:28
Mile 6: 10:03
I made my first water stop during the fourth mile. The water was so cold I could barely down it.

And I finally saw Gillian! The sixth mile is comprised of two out and back sections within Centennial Park, so I kept an eye out for her, figuring she was ahead of me. And she was! We waved to each other, and I never saw her again after that; she finished about three minutes before me.

nashville hot chocolate 15k 2016

Mile 7: 9:55
Mile 8: 10:14
Mile 9: 9:34
These miles were the worst. We were running from the park back to downtown and the wind was blowing against us, and it was SO cold. I actually got colder these last three miles than I felt at the start.

My time on mile eight was a little more than I would have liked because I was fumbling with my phone trying to get my music going for the last bit of the race. Hard to do when you are wearing three layers of fabric over your hands.

2016 hot chocolate 15k nashville

Final 0.3 (0.44 to my watch): 4:14 (9:42 pace)
I took a short walk break just after the nine mile marker to prepare myself for the finish. I know that makes no sense logically, but it helped me so much mentally. I pushed super hard across the finish line until I had the feeling I was going throw up. I actually thought I might do it this time, but I didn’t. I got my medal and my hot chocolate. I was done.

2016 nashville hot chocolate 15k

Official Time: 1:37:16

Race Review

The race was well done, as always. On the Thursday before the race, they announced they would be implementing their cold weather plan. This meant they would be diverting people slower than 13 min/mi to the 5k so the volunteers standing out in the cold could go home sooner, which I think is smart. It was super cold.

It’s not something the race directors can control (without changing the date), but I do wish that it wasn’t 20 degrees on this weekend every single year. The weekend before it was in the 50s and the weekend after is supposed to be in the 60s, but we didn’t get above freezing the weekend of the race. I would love to stick around and enjoy my chocolate and cheer on my friends and wait for people, but I’m always frozen solid five minutes after finishing. I was so cold this year, I started to have a panic attack because it was so painful. Note to self: If you run this next year, bring Hot Hands for after the race!!

The swag was great, as usual. This year my jacket had “2016 Finisher Nashville” stitched onto it for being one of the first 10% to sign up. I feel like the mug had more dipping options in it, including three heart shaped marshmallows, which were yummy!

Race Analysis

I completed my goal! My official average pace was 10:27 per mile (my unofficial pace was 10:18 with the extra distance). Here’s my 5k splits:
pace for the 2016 hot chocolate 15k

The average pace for these in miles instead of kilometers is 10:42 min/mi for the first 5k, 10:20 min/mi for the second, 9:55 min/mi for the third, and 8:19 min/mi for the last little 0.22 km that my watch went over due to weaving or whatever.

Based on this pace, I’m looking at about a 2:20 half. I’d like to be closer to 2:15, so we will see what speed work can do.

Fueling

Night Before: a fantastic dinner of Thin Mints, Oreos, and potato chips
Pre-Race: 75% of a Nutrigrain bar
During Race: just water
Post-Race: hot chocolate plus marshmallows and wafers dipped in chocolate

Gear

Sports Bra: Champion Shape T-Back
Top: Lululemon Face the Frost 1/2 Zip
Bottom: Brooks Utopia Thermal Tights
Socks: ProCompression Socks
Shoes: Mizuno Wave Sayonara 2 (my second pair)

02.08.16
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Week of 2/1/16 – 2/7/16: Rock ‘n’ Roll Nashville training, week 6

week of 2/1 to 2/7

Monday: rest day
Tuesday: 3.0 miles (11:00 average pace)
Wednesday: 4.3 miles (10:44 average pace)
Thursday: rest day
Friday: rest day
Saturday: 8.0 miles (11:23 average pace)
Sunday: 6.6 miles (11:30 average pace)

My first 20+ mile week in ten months, wow!

East Nasty’s half marathon speed workouts started this week. They are on Thursdays, as usual, but I couldn’t make the first one because of a Preds game. It was on the schedule as “2x (3 min / 2 min / 1 min)”. I wasn’t sure what this meant, so I made something up and did that for my Tuesday treadmill run. I warmed up for a mile and then did two repeats of 3 minutes at 6.1, 2 minutes at 6.3, and 1 minute at 6.5. Then I finished out the third mile with an easy cool down.

(I think the workout actually has something to do with hills, but as you can see from my 1,224 ft total elevation gain this week, I had more than enough hills on my other runs.)

On Wednesday, I went out to the usual East Nasty run. Jonathan was supposed to join me, but he got caught up at work, so I ran with the same people I had the week before. It was a good run! However, I noticed my left leg tightening up in the IT band/quad area when stopping for cars on the last mile or so. I met up with Jonathan for pizza at Five Points afterwards and didn’t think anything else of it.

We slept in a bit on Saturday and went out to the greenway just before lunch. The plan was to run the “flatter” section of the greenway (none of it is actually flat), but once we got a quarter mile down, we saw it was flooded. Thus, we ended up running the hillier section. We got eight miles in, but it was a little tough, and I had to stop and walk a few times. My knees were absolutely killing me nearly the whole run! And I could still sort of feel the tightness in my left leg as well, so I tried rolling that out when we returned home.

Jonathan is playing indoor soccer on Sundays this season and he plays out near Percy Warner park. I wanted to go out there and run the 5.8 mile loop (or some of it, depending on how tired my legs felt). I decided I would do 4:1 intervals to assist in recovery, since I had just done eight miles the day before. I followed all the arrows next to the signs that said “Running Route” and…5.8 miles later, I still wasn’t back where I started. I kept going, thinking it had to be soon, but after another mile, I conceded that I had no idea where I was and started looking up maps.

I walked for probably another two miles before running into Jonathan looking for me. Thank goodness for great boyfriends who won’t leave you lost in the park! I interestingly got negative splits on this run, despite the crazy elevation profile, probably because I was wanting more and more for it to be over with by the end.

negative splits

When I got back and finally examined what went wrong, I realized I had been following the arrows for the 11.2 route. Oops!

As the night progressed, my left IT band slowly got tighter and tighter to the point where I had to take ibuprofen just to fall asleep because it was so annoyingly painful. I’m going to take two days rest and make sure I’m doing all my clamshells this week!

02.04.16
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Week of 1/25/16 – 1/31/16: Rock ‘n’ Roll Nashville training, week 5

week of 1/24 to 1/31

Monday: rest day
Tuesday: rest day
Wednesday: 4.3 miles (11:30 average pace)
Thursday: rest day
Friday: rest day
Saturday: rest day
Sunday: 6.4 miles (11:19 average pace)

This week did not go as planned.

I took my normal rest day on Monday. As I mentioned at the end of last week’s post, Jonathan’s car battery had died, so instead of running on Tuesday, I ended up driving him to the car dealership to pick up his fixed vehicle and then gorging on cheese dip and fajitas at SATCO. Yep.

I did make it out to the East Nasty run on Wednesday. I ran with some new people (or really I was stalking behind them for the first half of the run until I finally said something) because they were doing a nice steady pace and it was easy to just follow along.

On Thursday, we ended up going downtown to briefly check out some of the NHL All Star stuff before the crowds got there on the weekend. And I didn’t run on Friday either.

We had good intentions to get up on Saturday to do our long run before heading downtown for the All Star festivities, but neither of us slept well Friday night, so we chose to turn off the alarm and get some more sleep.

NHL All Star game in Nashville

So I didn’t get out again until Sunday and was wanting to get between 7-8 miles.

It. Was. Miserable.

I don’t know if it was all the walking the day before or what, but I was ready to call it quits after mile two. I walked so much, which I haven’t really done lately. I was blaming it on everything. I was hungry. It was hot. I was dehydrated. It was windy. It was all I could do to make it to 6.4, just shy of my seven mile goal.

I’m starting to not expect much from the 15k in a couple weeks.