I’ve been running mile repeats, and they paid off today. I ran the McDonald Forest 15K for the first time. It’s all up and down on trails and forest roads, with almost no flat stretches. I ran the first three and a half miles at 3/2 breathing (three steps on an exhale, two steps on the inhale; a poor man’s heart rate monitor) to keep myself at a reasonable pace. I thought I might be going out a little fast, but my breathing felt comfortable, and I was happy with the people around me (they didn’t look as if they should be a lot faster than me — that’s scary and used to happen a lot when I was younger and stupider), so I kept going.
At 3.5, the uphill started. We started at an a elevation of 495 feet, and we didn’t stop going up until we got to 1,300 feet at 5.64 miles. That’s an average 7% grade. The hill was brutal. I walked some sections of it, and I was going almost as fast as the runners ahead of me. A handful of people passed me. I passed one or two people back while I was running, but for the most part, the people who go out too fast and burn up didn’t show up for this race. All of the people around me, and some of the people behind me, were in as good or better shape than I was.
Nowhere was this contrast with a normal road race more clear than on the downhills. Just after the summit of the big hill, we dropped off a cliff, losing over 200 feet in a third of a mile. We regained fifty feet, which felt like more, through an ugly clearcut, and from there, it was almost all downhill for three miles to the finish. I flew on the downhills, but I hardly passed anyone. In a normal race, if I had run that fast, I would have had trouble dodging the roadkill, dozens of people who had blown up on the hill and were limping to the finish. Not today. I passed maybe three or four people on the downhill in mile 8 (dropping 500 feet in a mile, an average 10% grade), and two or three people on little uphill stretches in the last mile.
I almost ran out of gas on the last uphill, a nasty little 90-foot climb in 0.2 miles. I blew it mentally with about 100 feet to go, walking about three steps before the 22-year-old woman behind me yelled at me to keep going. I had just passed her after chasing her for an hour. She verbally abused me, with good reason, and I made it to the top of the hill. Somehow, I found a little bit more in my reserve and managed to zip down the hill to the finish, 0.3 miles and 40 feet of downhill (it felt like a bigger drop). That bit of course may be the most fun final quarter mile of any race course I have run on, with the possible exception of the Burke Lake Park 3-mile cross-country course from my Virginia high school days.
In case the narrative doesn’t describe the hills clearly enough, here are my splits for each mile. I have every reason to believe that these distances were measured accurately, and I believe that my effort was about evenly paced (i.e. on a flat course, these splits would have been within a 10-second range above and below 6:30 per mile).
Mi Split Overall 1 6:40 6:40 2 6:15 12:54 3 7:16 20:09 4 7:47 27:56 5 10:09 38:05 6 8:27 46:32 7 7:34 54:07 8 5:40 59:46 9 6:49 1:06:35 9.3 1:31 1:08:07