2015 RUM RUN 10.3K RACE (?) REPORT

Did you say 10k or 15k? 16k? 13k? I need a drink.

Well, I was a little disappointed when I realized Sunday morning I forgot to write a preview for this race. I will tell you that I settled on a "sub-46" as my "A" goal. Considering this course is long, that translated to about 7:15/mile. Seemed like a good challenge given where I am fitness wise. I am getting back into better shape, but I am still nowhere near fast enough to match my PR speed of 6:57.

Now that this "race" is over, I'm glad I didn't waste my time on such a preview! What happened? Well, the 10k became a 15k for most. Everything was going to plan, another Rum Run morning, nothing out of the usual. The race starts and we run toward Tualatin Park. I had checked the route the night before just to double check that nothing had changed from last year. It hadn't. So the race leaders start streaming into Tualatin Community Park.

"No, no, no! This way!" yells the police officer manning the split off to the park. He was telling them to continue on the road. I was back about a block and instantly confused. Why wouldn't we go through the park like normal? I had a gut feeling the cop was misinformed about the route, but the leaders raced back and followed his instruction. I really wanted to break off the pack and go the RIGHT WAY but I followed the herd. Maybe they knew something I didn't?

Same event in 2012. My first 10k!

Well, they didn't. We ended up running on a street and having live traffic going both ways. The field is sizeable so we took up a lane of traffic ourselves. There was a biker everyone seemed to be following, thinking it was the lead bike, but I think it was just a dude in a yellow bike shirt that happened to be going about the same speed as the leaders. At some point he stopped and looked confused. A couple runners stopped to chat with him and then continued running. I imagined the conversation as "you're not the lead bike? Oh, well then..."

We ran almost two miles before a Tualatin Police SUV goes tearing by us with its lights on. It swerves in front of the leaders and tells them to turn around, they are going the wrong way. As soon as I saw it go by me I knew what was up. So everyone is like "WTF?" but flips around and starts running back. The leaders had at least four extra miles added to their race (they were over two miles out at that point) while the slower runners/walkers maybe had an extra two miles added. So if you ended up running the whole route it would have been 8-10 miles depending on how fast you were.

At that point I was pissed. I was hauling ass and really focused on getting the best 10k time I could. I really wanted to have a measure of my race fitness. The entire race was fucked up now, people were running different lengths and my final time would be meaningless. Who wants to haul ass for a 9.7 mile finish time and really have nobody else to judge it against? Immediately I began calculating in my head how much I was going to run and how much I would run if I switched to the 5k route once I was back on track. It became clear to me, from where I turned around, that if I "switched" to the 5k I would actually end up running about a 10k.

Everything to the left of the arrow was a "bonus."

So that's what I did. My watch actually beeped right at the mile markers once back on the course so I knew a switch to the 5k would put me at 6.1 miles. I planned to add a little "flair" somewhere to hit 6.22. Well, needless to say, I didn't have to do that, because this is Energy fucking Events and they don't give a shit about actual correct distances. The 5k course as planned was 3.4 miles. What the fuck guys. And here I was every year complaining about the 6.35 mile 10k course. Apparently Energy Events is not the company whose race you want to do if you actually care about the accurate running part.

Anyways, we had to weave through the ENTIRE 5k field (which was quite large and quite slow) on a small park path. Fun? I saw some other fast looking people branch off at the 5k split so I figured other people had the same idea. So I split off for the 5k. I kept having to remind myself to run hard, I was really pissed off and frustrated my race was ruined and my pace would suffer. I didn't end up having to run extra because the 5k course was so long, so I ran around the lake and prepared to finish strong, knowing I'd end up running about 6.4 miles.

"And we have our first 10Ker! The winner of the Rum Run 10k is Thomas Graf from Beaverton!" For fucks sake. Really? I immediately looked at the announcer dude and gave him the "nuh uh" sign and he looked at me and was like... oh. My parents were there at the finish and immediately knew something was wrong, because 1) LOL like I actually won, and 2) I was waving the guy off basically telling him to shut up. So after explaining to my parents and bitching about what happened I went to the results truck and had the guy either DQ (mmmm, Blizzard...) or switch me to the 5k. He switched me to the 5k so I am the proud owner of a 46:27 5k time now. I knew others ran the entire 10k course and didn't want to mess anything up for them.

Better memories at this race.

Looking at the results a lot of people just switched to the 5k route. The winner, listed right now, finished about a minute after me. Curious, I looked at his results from other races and he is normally just slightly slower than me. So yeah, he did the same thing. There is also a large amount of middle aged women in the top 20 with finish times in the low to mid-50s. So the 5k switch was quite popular, I just set the trend apparently. The results are useless to compare anybody against anything. I went to the beer garden, pounded my mojito and beer (YUM!) then went to my parents house for lunch. Stupid race.

My official time was 46:27 (7:16/mile) on a course of 6.41 miles. The last two years I have clocked the actual course at 6.30 and 6.29 on my watch or phone. Using this data I can calculate...

Official time: 46:27
Normalized "Rum Run" time: 45:40
Normalized 10k time: 45:05

So I guess you could say I got my "A" goal. Which is awesome, considering my lack of motivation once we had to turn around almost two miles in and the amount of 5kers I had to slow down for and weave around in the park. If they didn't fuck up and I could have ran the whole race hard I could see myself easily getting a "low 45" time on this course. I'm a little disappointed I don't have an official 10k to my credit. Maybe I'll sign up for another one this summer sometime. Unfortunately it's about time to start training for Portland in the fall so that will take most of my effort moving forward.