Exciting news and a not-so-exciting race

Those of you who know me well, or have been following me closely on the blog know that I've been talking a lot about Oiselle recently. This by-women, for-women company makes awesome clothes and sponsors a number of elite and non-elite athletes throughout the country. Last year, I applied too late to be considered to join their team, but I couldn't let it go. Oiselle fosters a great community that's so inspirational, plus their clothes are so stylin'. I kept in touch with the team manager throughout the year, and I'm pleased to finally officially announce that I'm one of the newest members of the Oiselle Volée team! If you don't believe me, check out my profile on the Oiselle website. I am already really feeling the love--women that I've never met wished me luck on my race via Twitter and I can't wait to meet up with some of the more local ones. And now I'm essentially sister-runners with the likes of Lauren Fleshman, Kate Grace and Kara Goucher. It's going to be a great year.

My awesome Volée welcome kit

I had my first race running for Oiselle this past weekend. As you'll surely recall, I'm up in Vermont for the summer, and Middlebury put on a 5k fun run to benefit student scholarships. The race took place on their cross country course, which forms part of their incredible TAM-trail around Middlebury. I run this section of the TAM at least twice a week; it's well groomed and keeps me on my toes due to the rolling hills. That being said, I knew that this 5k was not going to be my fastest.

Spot the bird! Some of the Spanish school before the race.

Even though this race was small and local, I wanted to run well because it was my first race repping Oiselle. Like any well-trained runner, my intentions started days before with track workouts, proper hydration and attention to sleep...except that I'm also taking advantage of my Spanish summer and have been going out dancing salsa. So while my plan for the Saturday race was to get a solid 8 hours of sleep on Thursday night (sleep runs on a 2 days cycle and this Thursday is the night before the night before, we've talked about this right?), I ended up dancing until at least 1 in the morning with class at 9 AM the following day. Friday night wasn't much better so I was worried how this serious lack of sleep would affect my performance. 

Going into the race I had a couple of goals. It was being "scored" by language school and the top 3 runners of each school were to win a prize. This prize ended up being a tiny plastic trophy so it wasn't worth much. What I was more aiming for was to be one of the top women, and to run a respectable time. As I warmed up and stretched out before the race, I was able to size up the competition--there wasn't much. A couple of girls looked like they could maybe be fast, but this was a small race so I figured that I could do well. 

None of us paying attention, on purpose

The course was an out and back that was heavily downhill for the first half, and regrettably uphill the second half. I knew my splits were going to be fast for the first half and I was ready. I also knew (and let me get up on my soapbox here for a minute) that a lot of the people running this race were doing so for fun, and didn't have a great sense of pacing. The race went out fast but I stayed just a little behind the lead group. Sure enough, within half a mile, I was passing some of them already. There was one girl in front of me, wearing spikes, who looked pretty legit. I tried to hang on but she already had a lead on me. I settled in to make sure no other girls were around me, and that a couple of buddies stayed behind me. My first (extremely) downhill mile was a 7:10. I was happy with that and tried to keep pushing myself, because a 5k at 7:10 pace on this course would be awesome. Unfortunately, things went, only figuratively, downhill from there. I turned around at the halfway mark, tried to focus on running the tangents and hit my second mile at 7:42. Not great, but I could work with it. 

At this point, I was in no man's land. The guy (in Vibrams, what?) in front of me was gone, and there wasn't anyone behind me, breathing down my neck to push me forward. I came out of the woods onto the grass that approached the hill. It is a massive hill, and it killed me. I hadn't felt lactic acid burn in my legs like that for ages. I realized then, in that moment, that despite the great and consistent track workouts I'd been doing for weeks, I hadn't trained on hills. My body couldn't respond. I was a little embarrassed at my lack of training foresight and totally sucking air. As I crested the hill, I tried to shake it out and keep up whatever momentum I had left. Then my Garmin struck again, and my 3rd mile showed up as 8:17. I was toast. I finished in 24:25--definitely NOT my best time, and ended up 5th overall for the Spanish school but 2nd girl. It was a hard race but given my limitations, I don't know that I could have done any better. Afterwards, I talked to the girl who finished ahead of me. She talked in Portuguese and I in Spanish, and she told me that she had run mid-distance at Lafayette, a DI school. I didn't feel so bad after that; she would have beaten me any day. We cheered the rest of the runners in, I cooled down and headed first to brunch, then to a lake, then to a local beer festival. Despite not running a fast time, it was a great way to start the day.