Al Gordon 4 Miler

Ran another race yesterday morning, this time a 4 miler. I broke 7 minute miles (6:57), which is decent, but nowhere near my PR for that distance. I was 485 out of 2,260 men (beating 78.5% of the men - it was a men only race, the women went off separately an hour later). I was actually home and headed back into my warm bed at 8:50, 10 minutes before the ladies heard the horn starting their race. It was still very congested the first mile of the race. Afterwards I was exhausted, didn't wake up until 5:30 (a 7.5 hour nap!)

Bronx Half Marathon Race Report

It was cold out there today, 19 degrees F at the start of the race. I got picked up at 6:32 a.m. (ouch!) by my teammate Peter and his friends Steve and Allison. My prerace meal was 60% of a bottle of blue Gatorade (sometimes referred to as "Smurf juice") and a carmel flavored Powerade gel. Mmmmmmm.

I adopted a different strategy this time after my bad experience at the Manhattan half 2 weeks ago. In that race I ran a 7:15 pace the first 10 miles, but then crashed and burned the last 5k. I decided to start out slower and try to avoid struggling at the end. Oddly enough the results were nearly the same. My net time in Manhattan was 1:39:19, today I managed a 138:59. So that was a slight 20 second improvement, plus I felt a lot better at the end.

That feeling didn't last long as I had to wait for the others to finish, although not too long, only 9 minutes. I had 2 cups of "hot" chocolate, which was actually piping hot for the first 15 seconds or so, but cooled off quite quickly when subjected to the chilly air. Allison noticed I was shivering as we were standing around drinking the kind of warm cocoa and we all headed back to the car.

I tried to memorize some splits, here they are: one was 52:30, so that must have been 7 miles. So that was 7:30 exactly, which was my plan. Mile 10 was about 1:13, so I ran those 3 miles in 21:30 or a 7:10 pace, mile 11 read 1:21 or so, so I slowed to an 8 minute mile for that one (we were going up the hill that was a downhill for mile 8). And finally 17 minutes for the last 2.1, an 8:05 pace. My overall pace was 7:33.

Megan Update

Here are 2 photos that I received today of Megan, the daughter of Jill, one of our teammates from last year's marathon training season. Jill had to stop preparing for the race in early September when Megan was diagnosed with Rhabdomyosarcoma, a rare form of cancer.

Many of us upon hearing about her story decided to try and keep Megan in our thoughts and prayers. But being the kind of people we are, we didn't stop there. Maggie Schwarz supplied team members with bibs with Megan's photo to wear during the marathon. Eugene Koenig and I went to the kids' race the weekend following the marathon and shot a little video that we sent along to Megan to inspire her to get better (the video is on most of the DVD's that I sent out in December, but not the first batch, since it wasn't done yet). It featured a lot of the kids giving encouraging wishes to Megan on camera.

In addition, as part of Adam's Thanksgiving program, I took one of the $200 grants he graciously supplied and used it for Megan. I bought 3 CD's of Disney music, which I gave to Megan (after copying a couple of the tunes to my computer to use in the video - shhhhh, don't tell Disney!) I used the rest of the money to buy her video games for the X-Box 360 which Megan had won at a holiday raffle (ok, so the raffle may have been fixed). I had read that kids undergoing chemotherapy often find playing video games helpful to take their minds off the pain & discomfort. Plus I'm a boy and I like shopping for video games, more than say, clothes or dolls. :-)

So I put the 3 video games, the 3 CD's, the kids DVD, a marathon DVD, and a shirt from the kids' race into a FedEx box and shipped it out on Thursday night December 21st, so Megan would have everything by Christmas. And the above photos are of Megan playing one of the games while home from school on a rare "snow day" in North Carolina.

Thanks once again to Coach Adam for donating the money for the gifts, and for creating the kind of community where teammates go out of their way to help one another out whenever possible.