|
|
FLRC Newsletter - September 2004 |
| Catching the Falmouth Road Race | |
It was early spring when I found out that a good friend of mine was going to get married in Cape Cod the weekend of Aug 7th, colliding with my own plans to improve on my Madness time from last year. It would be hard to serve as best man in Massachusetts on Saturday and run an 18-mile trail race the next morning in Ithaca. Reluctantly, I gave up on Madness for this year. But my ears perked up when the bride contacted us a few weeks later to warn us that accommodations in Falmouth would be scarce because of "some big road race" that same weekend. Maybe I could squeeze in a race after all!
Falmouth is a big race in a small town, easily rivaling Boilermaker for turnout and organization. In addition, however, Falmouth is only 70 miles from Boston, and located in scenic Cape Cod. (Contrast both with Utica.) They now use a lottery system to select entrants, and they require that both the request for the lottery entry and then the entry itself all be submitted through the mail. As I scanned their website in early May, I realized the window of opportunity had almost closed. I hastily sent off a request for an entry, and just as quickly sent it in after it arrived. This haste would cost me later.
As this would be our first visit to Cape Cod, and we had both a wedding and a race planned, we decided to take a long weekend out there. The Thursday afternoon drive out was uneventful, and we strolled around town that evening breathing in the relaxed atmosphere of tiny Falmouth. The bed-and-breakfast we'd chosen turned out to be across the street from the church (great!) and only a few minutes walk from packet pickup and the buses to the race start (even better!). As we familiarized ourselves with town, we witnessed the most startling behavior I'd ever seen on the roads of the eastern seaboard: cars stopped for pedestrians even before they entered the street, and traffic yielded to oncoming left-turners out of sheer courtesy. I actually saw drivers smile when they waved at us to cross. Despite tourist and race-related traffic, we never heard a car horn.
Friday morning I went to get my race packet. As I studied my pickup card I realized with horror that what I thought had been a meaningless serial number on the stub was actually my bib number: 5767. The entire race is run along narrow, two-lane streets, and even the starting area is an ordinary-width road, so the race organizers have instituted a staggered starting system, with waves of runners departing every few minutes until the last group leaves at 12 minutes after race start. That was where my bib number put me: 5000 people and 12 minutes behind the start. Sure, the race was going to be chip-timed, but I'd be starting on a narrow street with huge throngs of slower runners ahead. Desperate, I talked to a race official for almost half an hour, trying to see what my options were. She was understanding and apologetic, but brought me a copy of my entry form and pointed to where I'd left the seed time field completely blank. And it was too late to assign me a better starting position. If I wanted to start up near the front, I'd have to forego the chip since they disqualify runners who start earlier than their assigned wave. She tried to convince me that the staggered start system worked and things weren't as bad as they seemed. I finally agreed to give it a shot.
The weather all weekend was spectacular. No rain, plenty of sunshine, low temps in the 70s, and best of all, low humidity. Perfect for the wedding on Saturday. The ceremony was beautiful; I managed not to drop the ring, and slogged through the traditional toast at the reception without too much embarrassment. After a few more sips from a few more glasses, I started to feel pretty good. The hard part was over. As I explained to one dumbfounded guest, it was being best man that had me worried the whole weekend; I certainly knew how to run!
Seven hours later, I was jogging over to take a bus to the race start. I hadn't bothered to even pack a race-day T-shirt, but to my surprise, almost everyone else was wearing a shirt or even layers. The bus driver joked that he couldn't let me on without a shirt.
As we pulled into Wood's Hole at the eastern extremity of Cape Cod, I realized that although the crowds were similarly enormous, this race was nothing like the Utica Boilermaker. Instead of a central camp of porta-johns, the toilets were spread out in groups of 30–50, scattered around several small village blocks and along the long starting corrals. This was far more effective than I'd ever seen, with short lines almost everywhere and no tough choices between warming up versus emptying out. No one even approached a bush; one runner told me he'd seen people thrown out in previous years for using the wrong front yard to relieve themselves. The two Wood's Hole institutions (Marine Bio Lab and Wood's Hole Oceanographic Inst) dominate the town, so the start area feels like a combination of a university campus and a tiny, shore-side town in Maine.
As the 10:00 am start approached, the crowds filtered into the starting corrals. I headed to the front, taking up a position immediately behind some sawhorses. As we waited, I talked to a few other runners. Glancing at my shirtless, scrawny form, they instantly realized we might not all be running the same pace, and so I explained my predicament. They nodded understandingly and pushed me forward even further until I was staring directly at the back of a race official at the front of the corral.
The gun went off up near the starting line, and craning our necks, we saw a tiny wave of heads peel off from the crowd and disappear up a rise in the road and around a curve. Over the next ten minutes, the officials slowly prodded our group in a controlled approach to the starting line. At 10:12, they fired a much tinier gun, and we were off.
Adrenaline and tension surged through me like fire. I sprinted for several hundred meters, thinking only of staying ahead of the 5000 people behind and trying to catch the 5000 ahead. It felt like that first 200 of an 800-m race on the track, before things start to hurt and while you still feel tall and strong. About half a dozen of us led the way up the tiny rise in the road, and it didn't take much longer before we lost contact with the runners behind all together. We probably started out close to 5:00 pace, and the people behind were running 9–11:00 pace. It didn't take long for them to drop back. I felt good, though I knew already that I was out a bit too fast. But while the road was empty, I wanted to enjoy it.
At almost two minutes after our start, we caught the back of the preceding wave; they'd actually started four minutes ahead of us. Our pursuing band spread out, and I sought the edges of the crowd as I'd been advised. Miraculously, the other runners we were now catching allowed small gaps to widen just as I needed, and I dipped, rolled, tucked, jumped, and swerved through ranks of runners with ease. It demanded the same kind of agility and short-range vision as trail-running, though the obstacles and hazards themselves were much different. The road was surrounded on both sides by low embankments that made getting around people also an issue of getting up over them. But by choosing footing and strides properly, I was able to bounce off stone walls, vault railings, clip trees, and squeeze through the maze of elbows, kicking feet, and general pandemonium. I actually only connected with other bodies only a few times in the entire race.
The first mile went by in 6:01, and I could tell that, although the pacing was on target, the extra effort of weaving through the foot traffic was going to take its toll. But short of acknowledging the time on my watch, I could spare no effort to think about the rest of the race. Everything was focused on pushing forward, choosing chutes and openings to slide through or around. Pacing was not even really a concern. I was running 2–3 minutes per mile faster than most of these runners, and the level of effort felt like a strong 5K. I felt like I was literally going as fast as traffic would bear. The next mile rolled by in 6:08, and then a 6:14 as the density of the crowd increased even more.
The course wound through beautiful shaded lanes, simple New England overpasses, and gentle rises and dips in the road that apparently counted as the much-feared Cape Cod hills I'd heard described at the starting line. I only dimly noted the change from small village to beachside road. What I noticed instead was that now I could run off the edge of the road in the sand, and except for frequent mounds of sand tufted with tall grass, I could squeeze by without having to murmur "sorry" and "thank you." Often, as I drew near, a runner would somehow sense my approach and manage to adjust his or her stride to let me by with a minimum of effort. Everyone was so polite!
I hit 6:11 for mile 4, then 6:08 as we turned in from the beach and headed back toward Falmouth center. Glancing at other runners' bib colors, I was pretty sure I'd passed most of the fourth wave and was probably most of the way through the next one. I could run pretty freely and easily on the edge of the road, though I still had to dart in and out every few hundred meters to move around other runners. I was feeling more tired than I'd expected, and it was clear that I wouldn't be averaging the sub-6:00 pace I'd been hoping for. There were spectators along almost every part of the course, but perhaps because I was passing by after they'd already seen 30–40 minutes of runners, they were less vocal than I've seen in other races. More smiling faces to be sure, but less boisterous, even when I yelled to them as I ran by.
I hit 6:10 for mile 6. With only a mile to go, I started my now-traditional attempt to regroup and recover the pace. The 10K mark went by at about 38:10. The one thing I could remember from the race bulletin and course description was a tiny picture of runners climbing some sort of hill and a caption describing "Falmouth's version of Heartbreak Hill, only a quarter mile from the finish." I'd already decided that with Cape Cod basically at sea level, it couldn't possibly support a real hill, so I looked forward to the incline as just an indication that the race would be almost over. As we rounded another of a series of near-hairpin turns, I saw what I knew had to be the "hill" and sprinted up it, working to pass literally everyone I could see. As I recovered on the short backside, I saw one more rise come into view, and again I surged through the short 100-m rise. At the top of this final hill, I finally glimpsed the finish line flags and the flag from Mt. Rushmore flying above the cameras and crowd. I tore down the hill, actually catching everyone there was to catch, though I had to lean to catch the last guy (who had probably started 4–8 minutes before I did). The final mile turned out to be about a 5:56, and I finished in 42:50, 152nd overall out of over 8100 runners this year.
The finish line party was well stocked with hot dogs, juice, Cape Cod potato chips, Nantucket Nectar, Popsicles, and thousands of smiling, happy New Englanders. Wandering around the gargantuan ball field, I was surprised to run into Jeff Abbott, another Ithacan who had started up at the front and had had a great race.
Well, I thought to myself, after a spectacular wedding and perhaps too much champagne, I'd still managed to run in a world-class road race, and literally caught nearly half my competition. Not bad for a long weekend.
| Prev Article | Front Page | Next Article |