Pittsburgh Half Marathon 2013 Recap: Part Two

Part one of my race recap can be found here.

The race was scheduled to start at 7:00am, so we woke up at the ungodly hour of 4:30am to eat breakfast and get ready.  Last year transportation was a total clusterfuck so this year we avoided the buses and biked downtown to our friend’s apartment, where we stored our bikes to pick up after the race.  The bike ride there was fine--4 miles, downhill all the way--but the best part was after the race when I realized we still had to bike all the way home, uphill.  HAHAHAH just kidding, I almost cried.  Luckily we’d had to the foresight to bring our bus passes and the transit authority had gotten their shit together and provided enough buses for everyone to get home.  I have never before been so happy to ride a bus.

We got downtown around 6am, met up with our friend, stowed the bikes, and then headed to the start line and into the 2-hour goal finish time corral.  It was freezing, of course, since the sun was hardly even up, but we knew it was going to get much warmer very quickly.  We stood around and chatted for a little bit and then before we knew it the race had started...and ten minutes later we crossed the start line and were off.

D and I ran together for the first six miles, and during those six miles I felt fine.  Not amazing--I was running faster than is comfortable for me in hopes of improving my time--but fine.  I told D to run ahead of me because I could tell I was holding him back.  He took off around mile 7, and then things started going downhill.  Or should I say uphill.  Here’s the elevation chart, just to give you some context.  

This is one hilly race.  I’d done it once before, but this year felt so much harder, and I was really pushing myself to run faster and improve my time.  For most of the second half of the race I was kind of running by myself, between the 3:50 marathon and 3:55 marathon pace groups, which felt like a pace I could maintain.  Then all of the sudden this whole swarm of people engulfed me, and I realized that the 3:55 pace group had caught up to and were passing me.  After a few moments of blind panic I sprinted ahead of them and shuffled through my ipod to find a song whose tempo would maintain me.  I put that song on repeat for the remaining five miles, and as a result never, ever want to hear it again.

Once we finally turned off Carson Street and onto the last bridge, I knew the end was in sight.  I also knew that bridge was really effing hard, and I think a little part of me died out there that day, being blown around in the wind and inhaling the grit from the road and going up, up, uphill the whole way.  That was lowest point of the race for me, and knowing that I was running toward D, who was waiting for me at the finish line, is the reason I didn’t stop and take a nap out there on that awful bridge.

After we crossed the bridge it was a steep uphill and about another mile and a half to the finish.  I didn’t know how close to my goal time I was at this point--I started way after the gun and it’s hard to do math when you’re that tired--but I had a feeling I was approaching 2 hours.  My mind sharply narrowed into one thing:  beat two hours.  I didn’t look out at the amazing view on the top of the hill that my legs had just propelled me up, I didn’t look around at my fellow runners and marvel at the spirit of human achievement, I didn’t even look down at the road to see myself put one foot in front of the other.  I stared straight ahead and repeated to myself over and over again “2 hours 2 hours 2 hours.”  I crossed the finish line at 1:54:55 and nearly collapsed into D’s waiting arms.

Here are my splits, if you're interested in that kind of thing:

8:39
8:38
8:44
8:26
8:24
8:29
8:32
8:26
8:38
8:29
8:34
8:46 (that effing bridge)
8:11

I'm really glad I did the race again this year, and that D and I had the chance to train and run together for his first half marathon, but I'm not going to lie:  it was hard.  It was so hard that it wasn't really that much fun.  I had been battling knee and quad issues so I kind of slacked off the last two weeks of training, thinking that my prior work would carry me through the race.  We had a really cold winter and spring this year, and then were blasted with a very warm race day, which I'm sure had something to do with how we all felt during the race (hot and tired is how we felt, ugh).  Still, I don't know that I will ever run that fast again.  At least for me, sub-two hours hurts.  Although we are already signed up for a fall half marathon.  Some people never learn...

Book Review: Pain, Parties, Work

Somehow, I didn't read The Bell Jar until I was in graduate school.  I didn't know what I was missing, although I confess I never really identified with Esther Greenwood in the way many of Plath’s readers and scholars have.  I have always, however, absolutely love Sylvia Plath’s amazing, vibrant poetry, which is why I jumped at the chance to read and review Pain, Parties, Work.

On May 31, 1953, twenty-year-old Sylvia Plath arrived in New York City for a one-month stint at "the intellectual fashion magazine" Mademoiselle to be a guest editor for its prestigious annual college issue. Over the next twenty-six days, the bright, blond New England collegian lived at the Barbizon Hotel, attended Balanchine ballets, watched a game at Yankee Stadium, and danced at the West Side Tennis Club. She typed rejection letters to writers from The New Yorker and ate an entire bowl of caviar at an advertising luncheon. She stalked Dylan Thomas and fought off an aggressive diamond-wielding delegate from the United Nations. She took hot baths, had her hair done, and discovered her signature drink (vodka, no ice). 

Young, beautiful, and on the cusp of an advantageous career, she was supposed to be having the time of her life.  Drawing on in-depth interviews with fellow guest editors whose memories infuse these pages, Elizabeth Winder reveals how these twenty-six days indelibly altered how Plath saw herself, her mother, her friendships, and her romantic relationships, and how this period shaped her emerging identity as a woman and as a writer. Pain, Parties, Work—the three words Plath used to describe that time—shows how Manhattan's alien atmosphere unleashed an anxiety that would stay with her for the rest of her all-too-short life.

I must confess I really enjoyed this book.  It’s not a work of serious scholarship, not even a little bit, but it is still interesting to read and contains anecdotes, details, and secondhand interviews that I found delightful.  If you separate the poet Sylvia Plath from the girl described in the book, it’s even more enjoyable to read as a glimpse into both what it was like to be a young co-ed in 1953 and into the literary life in New York City in the summertime in the 1950’s.

The book is billed as a biography, which I suppose it is, but the content isn’t taken from a diary or personal letters, so it comes across as much more of a description of Plath’s job, things she did for entertainment, anecdotes from the other young women also working at Mademoiselle that summer, and random lists of Sylvia-related flotsam and jetsam.  All of this secondhand information somehow comes together to form a new, different picture of Sylvia.  It reminded me of Summer at Tiffany’s, only better, more interesting, and more beautifully written.

It narrowly focuses on the summer of 1953, but if you want to separate Sylvia the twenty-year-old co-ed from the tortured 30-year-old wife and mother who ended her life just as her fame was being fully realized, this book is the perfect way to do so.  It contains a fair amount of foreshadowing for Sylvia’s first suicide attempt only a few months later, but it also gives a glimpse into the happy, heady, whirlwind girl that she was and could have been.

Disclosure: TLC Book Tours provided me with a complimentary copy of this book to review. The opinions and views are all mine.

Pittsburgh Half Marathon 2013 Recap: Part One

View from the starting line at 7am

This past Sunday, D and I ran the Pittsburgh Half-Marathon together.  Well, we ran together for the first six miles until I encouraged him to speed ahead of me to finish in an incredible 1 hour 51 minutes.  And it was his first half marathon!  I managed to set my own PR, but I am convinced I will never run that fast again.  Although perhaps I should back up and start at the very beginning...

Back in October, when registration for the half first opened, I talked D into doing this race with me.  I thought it would be fun to have a training buddy, and that it would be a nice thing for us to do together, and I knew he’d be much better at it than me and faster than I am.  Then...we kind of forgot about it for a while, especially as the weather got colder and we got busy with other things.  

Until January, when I realized “Oh yeah, we’re doing a half marathon in four months!”  I pulled out my trusty Hal Higdon novice plan and started putting our runs on the calendar.  And then I remembered we were going to Italy for 10 days in the middle of training, and knew that there was no way I’d be hauling my running shoes to Italy.  My only plans for Italy involved drinking coffee and seeing the pope.  So I built in a little bit more of a buffer since we would be skipping two weeks of running in March, which meant that our first training run in January was done in the driving snow.  It was super fun.

Actually, most of our training seemed to happen in inclement weather.  Pittsburgh had a doozie of a winter this year, and it only ended about two weeks ago.  Our longest training run, 11.5 miles, was on April 20, and it flurried on us that morning.  Can I just pause for a moment and tell you how much I hate winter and how last year I was training in shorts starting in March?

But we persevered, and (mainly) stuck to our schedule so we’d be prepared to run 13.1 miles on May 5.  D even did track speed workouts, but I steadfastly refused because the only thing I hate worse than speedwork is speedwork that includes running around a big circle over and over again.  I’m so, so impressed with his dedication and in awe at how good he is at running.  I’ve been doing this for over 10 years, and he’s much more of a natural with only about 5 months under his belt.  

The day before the race, we made the mistake of going to the expo during the busiest part of the day, and I about had a heart attack at how many people there were and how big this race actually is.  It had never occurred to me before to be scared during a race, but Boston was on my mind and in my heart.  That, compared with the pressure I put on myself to PR on raceday (I wanted to break my previous PR of 2:02:42), felt like setting myself up for disaster.  D talked me down from the ledge and convinced me that skipping the race entirely wasn't a good idea, and we made a plan that we'd run together for at least the first half of the race.  All that was left to do was carb-load and get a good night's sleep for race day.