Iowa Games - 1500m race

I was super nervous for the 1500m race that I signed up for in the Iowa Games adult track meet that was held Saturday, July 14th in Ames. It was a spur of the moment decision to sign up and I only trained for about 10 days for it!!

But first we had to spend the hot day hanging out at the youth track meet. When it was over, we drove the 30 minutes home to cool down for a while, shower since we felt icky, and then headed back to Ames.

We cut it super close, and I get cranky when I feel like I am running late or in a rush. Hubs dropped me off at the stadium door and my warm up was running down to the track to get checked in. I threw on my spikes and then chatted with the other ladies for a few minutes. There was the 20-something, the 62 yr old that had just started running 8 months ago, and a couple other ladies in their 50's or so. I loved the 62 yr old. She had always been a walker but decided to step it up and start running, she had just competed in the Senior Olympics and run the 1500m in 9:07.

I asked the youngster what sort of pace she was setting for us and she said 6 min or under. I decided to try to stick close to her at the beginning.

And then we were off! I wasn't wearing my watch as I didn't want to either panic if I was going too fast or give up if I was going too slow. I stuck with the youngster for the first 300m, and the guy at the line gave us a split of 63 seconds. When I was running track intervals, a 63 second 300m had me gasping for air and needing a 90 second recovery before I ran again! I was feeling pretty good but knew that keeping up this pace would be ambitious, so I let her pull ahead of me.

I had mentally prepped a lot for this race. I knew it was just going to hurt for 6 minutes, I prepared to just get in the zone, concentrate on my breathing, and just keep running. Shut everything else out.

It worked! I honestly don't remember anything about how I felt. I just remember passing by my family each lap, the guy at the finish line calling splits, and that was it! I ran each of my 400's at a fairly consistent pace, about 1:40 each lap.

When I passed my family the last time I thought I heard the hubs call out "5:45". I had about 150m to go at that point so I knew hitting 6 was impossible but I had a chance of making it under my goal time of 6:15, so I took off with everything I had left. The guy calling splits at the finish was calling finish times - argh!

But when I walked back to my family - floating on the best runners high ever actually - hubs says he thought I was right around 6. "No way!" I said, "you had me at 5:45 when I passed you"

I heard wrong. He had me at 5:25!!

My final official time was 5:59.91. Just barely made it under 6 minutes. I came in 2nd overall (of 5) and 1st in my age group (of 1). This was such a fun event, we really need to get more participants next year!

Totally beyond my expectations. And I didn't feel horrible! I recovered pretty quickly and was running around on the field with the kids while we were waiting for the hubs to run (800m - 2:17.58 - he rocks).

We've got the track bug now. I mean, who wants to go run for 2 hours when you can knock out some intervals, get rest and water breaks, and the race is done in minutes?