I’m still sort of in shock over this.
If you’ve been reading all year, then you know that I’m sort of a geek for stats. I track my miles and times obsessively, and after a big race, I’ll often spend quite a lot of time breaking down my performance, to better understand my progress and hoping to glean lessons for future races. All of the technology available today makes this really easy. Strava tracks my efforts by GPS on my phone, and logs my heart rate data via Bluetooth, generating minute-by-minute data for later evalutation. Race results are posted online, usually the same day as the race and sometimes even as they happen. I can use them to gauge how well I’ve done against similar athletes, and sometimes against the conditions.
The breakdown from my race at this year’s Air Force Half Marathon provides an extra wrinkle of complexity, because I can compare it to last year’s race over the same course and distance. The course this year was slightly modified, but not in a way that would affect my time much either way.
Of course the biggest standout statistic was that I dropped nearly 26 minutes off my time from last year, which means I shaved nearly two minutes off my mile time. But more telling was my placement in the field, which accounts for the conditions of the day. The weather on a given day can speed up or slow the field dramatically, so my performance relative to them is a useful metric. This year over last, I improved by some 1760 places. Among just the men, I finished 945 places higher. The field this year contained some 1200 members of the military and their families, and among them I placed 181st. My run placed me just outside the top 10% of the field, and while it’s certainly an eternity between me and the winner, being near the top 10% is something. If I can drop my time by another ten minutes next year, I’ll be in the top 250 overall, and pass 100 runners in the military category.
Some people daydream about what they’d do if they won the lottery. I daydream of where I’d finish if I was just a little bit faster.
And I think I can get faster, still. Looking at my splits on Strava, I was far more consistent in this race than past races. At the Xenia half in April, I started out at a 9-flat mile, which ballooned to 10 after the first few miles, and was nearly at 11 by the end. At the Heights Half in June, I started strongly enough with five miles that were about 8:30. But then the wheels fell off, thanks to the heat and the lack of water stops mid-race. My last several miles were in the high 9s or low 10s, and my last mile was an 11-minute limp to the finish. On Saturday, at the Air Force half, my first ten miles were in the mid-to-low 8s. Miles 5-7 were within three seconds of each other, and represented my fastest segment of the race. After we lost our pacer to a cramp, my time slacked by about 30 seconds per mile, but that was also largely down to the problems my right foot was having. Even then, the difference between my first mile and my last was only a little over a minute, which is great news.
I owe a lot of that to running with the pace group, but it proved that I can do it. What this means is that I need to learn to hold a pace like that by myself, probably with the use of yet another gadget of some sort, or audio cues from my phone. If I can hold to the 8 minute miles I was turning in mid-race last weekend for a whole race, that will take another six minutes off my time. That doesn’t mean I’m in any danger of winning, ever, but I will have beaten myself. In the end, that’s all I’m racing for, anyway.