Last week I participated in a race. It was a ladies-only race, as the name of the race already suggests. Of course I was the only person who didn’t notice that, that until it was pointed out to me. I thought it was some kind of Latin name.
But anyway. It was a short drive to the location, where the Boyfriend and I met up with a friend from the gym.
After getting our race numbers, there was a warming up scheduled.
I don’t know why, but the whole thing lasted almost 30 min and it was tough! I skipped half of it, because I didn’t want to wear myself out. Several people did, you could see it on their faces.
Then, we lined up at the start….Find Wally! (Hint: you can only see my arms). The girls in the red and the blue tanks are young talented girls who probably will be going to the Olympics at some point. They both finished in 19 min, 4 min before the number 3.
Here is the warming up guy (some athlete) with the guy who commented on the whole thing. And I mean, the whooooole thing! Seriously, that guy did not shut up for a minute, even though you could only understand half of what he was saying.
And then we were off!!
At first I took it quite easy because I knew the course was all but flat. I was running a relaxed pace, planning to speed up during the race. However, I noticed my heart rate climbing rapidly, no matter what I did. I thought it were race-nerves, because I had the same thing during my other race. I just kept running and was feeling fine!
I don’t know why, but for some reason I hold my hand like I am trying to drink tea in a fancy way, holding one finger up, hahaha!
The whole race was through the woods:
Until the 3km marker I was doing pretty great, felt good, and was ahead of schedule. I even smiled for the photographer:
But by the time I passed this sign:
I was feeling awful! I knew that I was going to finish, but I just wasn’t sure how. I thought, hey, if I continue like this I will set a PR! But I couldn’t ignore the signals my body was giving me any longer: I felt exhausted, totally out of breath. My heart rate was sky rocketing. At some point I even considered walking for a while. Now, there is nothing wrong with walking, but it wasn’t in my plan! The weird thing was that I wasn’t really tired, if not just out of breath. I really felt like I couldn’t breathe well. About 200 meters before the finish: sheer exhaustion shows on my face.
And finally torture ended!! You can see that I managed to pass the person who was in front of me in the last picture.
I really felt sick afterwards. I felt light headed and nauseous. After I refueled and a showered I felt much better. Then it finally occurred to me that it must have been my allergies, I was still feeling short of breath, a weird feeling in my chest that I kept for the rest of the day. I also felt sick, like my system was fighting off something.
In the end, my time was 30.44 min, not too shabby given my physical condition and the tough course. But I never wanna go through this again, so I went to the doctor this week and got some medicine and now I feel better.
Despite feeling horrible, the race was fun! It was very beautiful and the atmosphere was nice and relaxed. I liked that they called each person by their name when they finished. Maybe next year I will run it again.
And now it’s on too the next race, I am sure that one will be awesome!
What was the worst race you even participated in?
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