North Brooklyn Runners: A Community Running Group Serving Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Bushwick, and Beyond!

Female 
30 - 34   5 Angela Ortiz           24:58
30 - 34   6 Anna McCusker          25:05

Now this is where I usually sign off, but I thought I’d do something differently this time and share my race experience:

I’ve been training pretty consistently for the past couple months and was hoping to race well and get useful feedback on how building for my goal peak at Team Champs is going. The weather report the night before scared me a little bit, but I resolved to race all out knowing that there was plenty of depth to back me up if I crashed and burned.

On the morning of, I was excited as always to travel to the park surrounded by the team. As someone who grew up playing team sports this is always a little bit nostalgic for me. These points races really give a boost of team pride and bring a feeling of “we’re all in this together” to a sport which is often solitary in nature.

After a good two mile warm up I found myself in the start corral alongside a mass of other NBRers, the nerves jangling until the starting whistle. I heard reports later that a West Side runner dropped his watch at the start and turned against the surge of humanity to retrieve it. Crazy. Just like Walmart on Black Friday, there’s a really good chance of getting trampled at these things.

The first mile flew by, a quick down and then up Cat Hill, with all the adrenaline pumping it was almost like it wasn’t there. A cup of water dumped over the head to keep cool. 5:18 and onto mile two.

Chris and Brian were in my sights until about this point, but they both took off. I tried to keep pace and concentrated on picking up my knees and keeping a long even stride. Whether this is right or not, I’ve been cycling with the idea that it will pay off in terms of keeping more consistent turnover. Maybe just thinking about it made it so, because my second mile was a little bit faster. 5:17. I’m sure that the fact that this mile was net downhill also helped.

Out of the 102nd St transverse and straight onto a series of hills for the third mile. Shorten up stride and keep good turnover. This was painful. 5:31

When I caught up to Brian towards the end of mile 3 he said he was done, but this obviously wasn’t the case. The fourth mile was downhill/flat and whereas I had given it all on the hills, he’d saved some for a good finish and passed me back with about half a mile to go. I wear a regular watch when racing rather than a Garmin so I don’t get bogged down with distance/pace calculations and can just run by effort, but I was checking the time every minute of the last mile hoping that it would tell me I was further along than I was. Turning the corner to the finish my lungs were screaming. I kicked with about 100 yards to go and I think I passed a Harrier and a West Side guy, but at that point it could have all been my imagination. 5:19.

NBR<3

-Rob

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