BETA testing

Coming off of a 14 mile run wasn’t the best pre-race workout. Friday just got too busy to go long, so I put it off until Saturday. Well, it rained on my parade but I made the best of it. Why? Because on Sunday, YaYa and I had a race planned!

It was 1 year ago when YaYa kicked off his racing career with this very race. I was only a little hesitant to sign him up again. He hadn’t actually trained for the 2 mile race, but who thinks about these details anyway? Oh yeah, I do.

Well, anyway, it didn’t matter much. He took 2nd place in his age group. Woo hoo! That’s my boy.

As for my race, I’d planned to use it as a BETA testing experiment. To be precise, I wanted to test how well my body would do, in a race environment, while on the BETA blocker.

I warmed up briefly and then lined up. But I didn’t stay warmed up for very long; my heartrate came down to the 60s by the time the race started. I watched Cindy run on ahead as my heartrate reached 120. During the race, I only looked ahead (to see Cindy getting away), and NOT at my heartrate.

Instead of checking my heartrate, I listened to my body. Much to my surprise, my body was plugging along. It was happy and that allowed me to encourage every runner I passed. “Looking good,” I said to one runner. “Come on; you can do it,” I told another runner. She started running again shortly after I passed.

It was strange; it felt like my legs were moving slowly and that I couldn’t make them go any faster, but then I could carry on conversations with ease. And even though I got my butt kicked by an 8 year old, my finish time was amazing.

But…the excitement only lasted a few minutes before I realized that the race volunteers must have signaled the turn early. Garminia reported that we’d only run 5.86 miles, NOT 6.2 miles. So, I took my 8:19/mile pace and figured out what it would have been had I continued at that pace for the entire 10K. My estimated 51:40 would have been a personal record (PR).

Well, I took credit for it anyway, and I’m going to keep it logged that way until after the marathon. I think that makes the BETA test a success.