Run for the Green

Before I totally forget everything about it I really should write about the trail race I did a few weeks ago. It was the week after the Little Rock Marathon, and before I had those sessions with the chiropractor, so I really wasn't feeling so hot but I wanted to do the race because it is part of the local trail running series, and unless you do six races you don't get a participation award.


This race, "Run for the Green," is held on trails in a park in Landen/Deerfield park. Like many of the other races, it is a little over three miles in distance. Landen is not an especially hilly area, but the trail sections of the race do have some hills and even a couple of knee-high creek crossings.

The weather was not bad, but the course was pretty muddy after all the rain we had been having and the melted snow. I guess they had rain last year and that would have been a lot worse. I got there about a half hour before the start to pick up my bib and shirt. The goody bag had more stuff in it than the bag at Little Rock. The shirt was white cotton, but longsleeved, and the race logo in green and black was not too bad.

A quick scan of the crowd told me that Brenda W., my old lady age-group trail running competition, was not around, and there weren't too many other old ladies.

Between my injuries and the marathon recovery, I had to take it really easy. I just wanted to finish, get a time, and not hurt myself, i.e, not slip in the mud and pull something else. I limped through a very slow warmup mile, wondering what people thought about the gimpy old fat lady in their midst.

I was wearing my old pair of Salomon trail shoes. They don't have any tread left on them, but they do drain water pretty well, and I figured once they were covered in mud it wouldn't matter about the lack of tread so much. The first part of the race is a little run around a grassy field, and it was soaked with water, so my feet were totally wet from the very first steps of the race. I knew then that I had made the right choice.

The course was pretty. There was a treacherous little section on the trails with a sharp drop off on the right overlooking the river (Little Miami? Miami Whitewater? which one, I am not sure, Little Miami I guess). Take one wrong step and you would be rolling down the hill into the river. Otherwise the trail was wide enough. There were some slick spots and it was hard to get any kind of speed up, which was just as well considering my condition.

We did cross the creek twice, and it was cold and deep. It would feel great on a hot day, but even on this mild morning in early spring it was not bad.

I did manage to pass a couple of people and remain upright. Almost slipped a couple of times but survived. At the end you come back out of the woods and have to run a circle around the grassy field again. I pushed hard then to stay ahead of the woman just behind me, who as it turns out is somebody I used to work with and I am glad that we did not recognize each other because it would just be too embarrassing.

Some skinny little fast runner type took my tag after I crossed the finish line and she congratulated me and I said something like, you have no idea, because really I am sure she had not idea that I had done a marathon the week before and I was doing this race even though I could hardly walk.

After the race I had some Starbucks (another great thing about this little race) and a decent cinnamon raisin bagel. I walked back to the car and took off my shoes and socks and decided they were not salvageable and I would be throwing them away. I had brought clean shoes and dry socks just for this reason. Shielded by my car and with a towel wrapped around me, I managed to quickly change into dry clothes without giving any residents of Warren County an eyeful. I was too tired to walk back to the bathrooms.

But after I got into the dry clothes I felt better and headed back up to the awards ceremony. I thought I might have placed in my age group, since there were not many old ladies there. And I was definitely the only one who bothered to stay for the awards. So I was really surprised when the got to my age group and then said there weren't any finishers! So in classic, cranky old lady fashion, I had to go up to the race director and his assistant (the skinny woman who had taken my tag when I crossed the finish line) and complain about why I wasn't in the results. They tried to shut me up by throwing a medal at me, as if that was all I cared about.

No, what I wanted, and the reason I had gone all the way up there to do this race, was an official finish time. So after some deliberation and their scanning of the results---they kept blaming it on the age-graded timing system, which didn't make sense---they did find me in there. I guess if you are really slow, it assumes you are dead and didn't finish? Aren't still breathing so don't deserve a time?

Officially, I was 1 of 1 in the age group, 70 of 87 women (this part does not bode well for my dirty dozen chances this year!) and 179 of 208 people. But I did get an official time. My time was 50:15, which was about what I had expected given my condition. Age-graded, this is a 43:49 or 33.76% (i.e., barely alive), which  moves me up to 158 of 208. I would like to go back next year and try to do better.