This morning, I did the River Bend Nature Center‘s “Maple Syrup Run,” a 5k trail race through the RBNC’s wonderful property on the (quite curvy) Straight River in Faribault, Minnesota. I didn’t quite hit my goal time but it was a great race, just as family friends who’ve run the race several times assured me.
The event took place in hand-numbing drizzle which probably slowed everyone down (and which didn’t make it fun for Shannon and the girls to watch) but which didn’t much affect the course’s dirt trails over the RBNC’s hilly terrain. After the usual scrum in the first 50 meters, the racers sorted out into a single file that crossed a bit of pavement and then plummeted down to the river bottom. We wound along the river on a twisty, wet path that was reminiscent of high-school cross country races and perfect for moving up the field – you could see everyone up ahead, count off the seconds after they went through a curve, and push harder to close the gap before the next curve. I was pleased to see that my heart rate was staying at the low end of my highest range – around 165 or so, or 90% of my maximum – and that I felt pretty good.
The riverside path ended abruptly with a sharp right turn onto a stiff, steep climb that recouped all the earlier elevation loss in about 50 meters but was for good for making a couple more passes. From there, we skirted the edge of the center, keeping just inside the treeline but also passing by the Faribault prison. Talk about irony: I paid cash money to run in the cold drizzle right past a place where you can’t run more than a couple hundred feet in any one direction.
Not long after that, near what must have been the end of the second mile, the course pointed back toward the interior of RBNC’s grounds and started a long, steady climb up the ridge that overlooks the interpretive center. This section wasn’t incredibly hard, but it did have a couple false ends – turn the corner and oh crap there’s more climbing to do. My heart rate spiked and stayed high here, and I started to feel some burning in my legs, but the effort was worth it, helping me pass another three or four racers on the climb. I couldn’t quite catch one kid who was just a few meters ahead…
At the actual top of the ridge, the course bent and went almost straight down to the prairie at the core of the center. I should have tried to speed up here, since it turned out that we were less than three minutes from the finish line, but I hadn’t studied the course map well enough, and didn’t want to blow up by trying a 100 yards-to-go pace with a half mile to go. Instead, I just maintained my pace until it was obvious we were finishing. And at that point, there was no one who could either catch me or be caught, so I just cruised in at 23:15, feeling pretty good in all the right ways – tired, but not crushed and pleased with having carried out my race plan. And Julia ran right up to me to hug my legs, shouting, “Good job!” All in all, a nice way to start the season.
With my intermittent personal history of running and fitness – a lot of cross country running and skiing and track in high school, then nothing for a decade until slowly starting again to run and rollerski and cross-country ski in the last few years – I am struck by the “types” of runners encountered at races like the Maple Syrup Run and the Defeat of Jesse James Days road races in Northfield every September. There are always a few obviously fast men and women – the whippets who use their extreme fitness, paucity of body fat, complicated shoes, and $75 shirts to take the top spots. There are quite a few the more-or-less fit but not very fast folks like me, and a smaller number of people who are pretty clearly out of shape, but trying hard to get back into the swing of things (and who often run, bafflingly, in full sweatsuits). Commingling with those groups are the kids, the teens and tweens who run with each other or with parents and who invariably take off like bullets, only to fade badly by about the 1-mile marker. Today’s run had a good number of racers in this last group, and I guess the top two men’s spots went to high schoolers. On the other hand, I spent the first five minutes of the race weaving through fast-starting young guns and caught a few more during the rest of the race – though I never did catch the kid who had to actually stop and walk up the last bit of the longest climb. He was saving something for a big sprint to the line. Crazy kid.
