So, the prior post (below) was all about my time. Now about the actual experience of the race: it was actually fun. Most of it is on a trail in the creek valley, and it's cool and shady down there. There had been some light showers in the early morning but they'd cleared up by the race time, so it was sunny but not too hot. (When the sun comes up at 5:00 AM and beats down for five hours, it's HOT.)

I ran alone again. I started out running near my running partner, but I lost him at the first or second turn trying to avoid the kids on bikes and the 3k walkers. I don't really know why, but apparently I'm a solitary racer even though I don't particularly like training alone.

Today is the 60th anniversary of D-Day, and I thought about D-Day and the second World War while I was running. When I was running up a hill near the end, I thought: "60 years ago some guys were trying to climb a hill on a beach in Normandy, only they were carrying their pack and weapon and getting shot at." It's cheesy but it helped me keep running.

I ran in the neighborhood 8k race today. Finish time was about 52:40 -- I don't remember the exact number, but under 53 minutes. That's not a particularly respectable time for an 8k.

Last year I ran my first race - a 3k 'fun run' - which I didn't realize meant no real timing. So I don't know what my time from that was, but I'm pretty sure it was over 20 -- around 22 minutes. That's so slow it's not even a respectable time for a 5k.

There's a formula that you can use to predict race times given your times for two different length races. A simple-minded approach would be to just make a linear relation between time and distance - if it takes 20 minutes to run 5k, it'll take 40 to run 10k. But because a runner slows down with increasing distance, that tends to underpredict finish times. So the formula accounts for that by including a term that relates the excess time in the longer run (e.g., if you run 5k in 20 minutes and 10k in 45, the excess is five minutes) to the difference in distance. There are some logs in there too. Anyway, my point is, there's a table I could put my times and distances into.

But there are two problems with this. First is that 3k and 8k are not standard race lengths so the table probably doesn't contain entries for them. The second is a bit more serious. If I run 8k in 52 minutes and 3k in 22 minutes, the excess time is NEGATIVE 6:40, so I can't use the formula at all. The excess time would make a negative contribution to the total race time, and because of the long distance it would be a rather large contribution. It would predict that I'd run a marathon in something like 1:40:00, which is world-record-breaking and excedingly unlikely.

On the other hand it means I'm better at running this time than I was last time.