My wife, Heather, is training for a half marathon next month and her training scheduled called for a 15k this week as prep. Not many races of that distance, so she had to settle for a 10K. Fortunately, there was one going on at Liberty Park, the Stop Traffic 5k/10k, which benefited efforts to stop human trafficking worldwide. The 10K race was 4 and a half loops around the Park.
This was Heather's race, but I figured I should run too so I decided to push our boys (almost 1 and almost 3) in the double running stroller. Initially, the plan was to run with Heather the whole race. In the first mile (7:42), I got a little bit ahead of her. Other runners and stroller pushers were surging ahead and I didn't mind -- because we weren't racing. Then Jack, our almost 3 y.o., told me that he wanted mom and that we should stop and wait for her. So we did. We stopped and waited for her a little bit. After running with her for maybe a quarter mile, she told me we should go on ahead and Jack seemed fine with that. Second mile was 7:50. So we kind of picked up the pace a little bit, and then a little bit more, etc. As the pace increased, however, Jack's resistance to being in the stroller increased more and more until there was a non-stop shriek of "I want to go home!", "I want to stop," and similar refrains. I didn't really want to stop (and figured he really didn't either despite his protests) so I figured the way to get the race behind us was simply to try to run a little faster. By the way, not a peep out of Luke, our almost 1 y.o., other than a few "weeeeee" sounds early on. It was a struggle to try to calm Jack down will at the same time picking up the pace. Indeed, Jack's very vocal protests started to echo my own internal dialogue--"I want to go home!", "I want my mama," "I want to take a nap!" etc. But we hung in there. The splits for miles 3,4 and 5 were in the mid-low 6:30s. On the final lap, someone yelled out to me that we were about 20 seconds behind the leader. So we tried to pick it up again, just to see. Last mile was 6:17, which isn't too bad pushing that big double stroller! I didn't catch the leader, in fact I didn't even catch the guy up ahead who was also pushing a stroller (albeit a single) and took third. I finished fourth and was happy to be done and get Jack out of the stroller.
Heather had a great race, running just over 50 minutes, finishing 6th woman. I suppose I "could have won" this race if I had not dogged the first couple of miles, but that was never the point. I'm glad I was able to give Heather a break so she could race. On the other hand, subtracting 30 seconds per mile per kid from the pace, and subtracting another 20 seconds per mile for negotiating Jack's outburst, and subtracting another 10 seconds because it was sort of raining, and subtracting another 15 seconds per mile because of the monotony of the course, and subtracting another 10 seconds per mile because I wore tights and overheated, and subtracting another 10 seconds per mile simply for good measure, I ran more like a sub 33 minute race, a solid PR. :)
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