Devils Chase Race Report: Following the plan

Coming into the last mile of the Devil's Chase this morning I had one thought in my mind: My coach was right. He was right about the pacing, he was right about using the virtual partner on the watch, he was right about what to wear.

This was my best running race in I don't remember how long. Like many good races, then pre-race had a few hiccups, but I'll get into that later. First, the race. 1200 people, at least half dressed in some devil-themed fashion, including a guy in a red speedo and body paint and many variations of deviled eggs (unofficial pictures here).

The plan was to run 7:34s throughout the race, monitoring my heart rate and reducing pace if the heart rate rose too much. I didn't want to go out too hard like I had in the Somerville Homeless Coalition 5K. I've spent a lot of my run training in low heart rate/ low pace zones, so I was a little worried about how fast 7:34 would feel. Turns out, it felt great. Comfortable for the first few miles, then hard, but not impossible.

I love using my garmin for to manage my run. Because the plan was pretty straightforward and because I can only program 1 "advanced" workout into my run, I had uploaded the warm up workout. Unfortunately, I had cut it a bit too fine and didn't have time to reprogram the watch for the actual race. So I just had the instantaneous pace displayed to work with. I hadn't appreciated just how much this metric varies. I'd look down and see a pace of 8 minutes then of 7, then back to 7:20. I knew I wasn't varying that much, so I tried to keep it fast and consistent. Next time I'll definitely use the virtual partner for this type of run.



Just past mile 2, a woman caught up to me. I held with her for a bit, then saw that we were some where near a 7:15 mile. Too fast. I thought about what my coach had said about catching people holding my pace and catching people at the finish. I let her go. She never got out of sight, and I caught her and held her off around 4.5 miles. :)

At mile 5 I was still feeling good. We came around a corner close to 5.2 miles, and I decided it was time to see what I still had left in the legs. I started picking people off. I got passed by one guy between there and the 6 mile mark. After that no more.

I did the 6th mile in 7:17, then sped up a bit more and did the final 6 tenths at a 7:04 pace. (Note: the first lap is 3 miles.)


I did the first 10K in 45:47 which is right around my best 10K time. I was so happy with this. I was the 104th person out of over 1200 and the 6th in the women 30-39 age group. So pleased.

Ok, back to the start. We got to the course a bit later than planned. You see 95 and 128 are pretty much synonymous in Boston, but apparently as you get to the north shore, they diverge. Andrea and I were engaged in a very in depth conversation about cords of firewood and missed the split. We still got to the course well before the start, but with registration and port-o-potty queues and dropping our warm, outer layers at the car, there wasn't a lot of extra time. So as we were dropping our clothes off, I thought I'd rather just run into the bushes to pee, rather than risking missing the start waiting for a port-o-potty. I searched out a spot that wasn't visible from the road and squatted. Then I noticed there was a bur on my gloves. Wait, there are burs on my jacket. Oh, no there are burs everywhere, outside and inside my tights. I did my best to de-bur-ify myself, but those were some scratchy tights. Luckily, the cool temperatures were numbing.

This little guy followed me home: