One hour, your local running track, lots of black cherry soda.
The more I hang around runners the more obscure shit I learn. Today I was introduced to the Titus van Rijn 1-Hour Distance Run. Why is it named in honor of Titus van Rijn? Hell if I know. Why do people drink black cherry soda after they finish this event? Another mystery.
ASIDE - it's lore like this that lets activity-specific nerds continue to be just that.
This was awesome! Today Trisha Steidl tried to break the record for women.
Trisha wanted to start her run at 9:30 so I showed up around 9:10. It was good to see that even an accomplished runner like Trisha isn't immune to the same race day issues that the rest of us sometimes face.
- Trisha was wearing what I'm guessing were brand new shorts because she didn't like the drawstring stuffed in her shorts and couldn't pull it out of the shorts.
- Turns out Uli Steidl left the paper with all the splits written on it at home. Luckily this guy is the human running computer and no paper was needed.
Instructions to the support crew were very last minute and pretty sparse, "Please tell me when I have 30 minutes to go, 10 minutes to go and five minutes to go." and, "I didn't have enough breakfast so I might need this gel." I took it upon myself to sync everyone up by conducting a formal countdown and after my, "Five, four, three, two, one, GO!" Trisha was off.
In truth she had great support! There was someone to call out 400 m splits every single lap, there was someone to hand her a water bottle and gel any time she needed it, she had Uli pacing her the entire time (and I can't think of anyone who does this better honestly) and she had about 15 people to cheer her on all the way around the track. She even had Glenn Tachiyama there to snap some 'real' pictures. It was an exciting hour! And Trisha ran hard for 60 full minutes.
For the first 20 minutes Trisha was right on schedule.
From there she started to slow just a little... It's amazing how much of a difference one or two seconds per lap makes when you run so many.
I would try to position myself around the track so that we would see each other at the intervals she had requested. With about 10 minutes to go I heard someone ringing a cowbell! Classic.
After about 15 minutes Trisha lost one pacer and with about 10 minutes to go she lost another. After the run she said she felt like quitting several times but she didn't! In fact, her expression hardly changed, the sweat stain on the back of her shirt just got slowly bigger.
Her original plan was to try and speed up with 10 minutes to go and as I watched I could tell that was going to be hard to do. Trisha did throw down some fantastic times for the last two laps but it was not quite enough to recoup the lost time and break the record.
What a strong effort! This kind of thing is so inspirational to watch, especially when you see how hard Trish trains. I think Trisha wanted more and falling just 200 m short is frustrating for sure but I was super impressed and am motivated to give this a shot next year to see what kind of distance I can post. Thanks for the motivation! Enjoy your soda, you deserve it.
Here are all my pictures and video.
What a great capture. Thanks Martin! For the record, I did surpass the on-the-books record. I was 101m short of the distance Pam put up on Monday (which, I assume, will be the new record, but you never know who else is out there doing this stuff). It might not have stung quite as much had I been a full 200m short.
ReplyDelete@Trisha - you are welcome! It was a blast watching and cheering you on.
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