Wild Turkey 5 Mile Road Race Report

I've been looking forward to the Turkey Trot in Salem for weeks. Why? Three reasons:

1. The web site said that the t-shirt was going to be "tech fabric".
2. It's a late fall race, so the t-shirt was pretty much guaranteed to be long sleeved.
3. The registration site allowed you to specify your t-shirt size, so I was sure to not get XXXL.
   

Really, can you ask for more in a race? I think not.

Since 5 miles isn't even as long as my training runs have been lately, I decided to run this event for speed. Well, "speed" is a relative term I guess, but my goal was to break 45 minutes, or 9-minute miles. I usually avoid "speed" goals because I invariably go out way too fast, have GI distress by mile 1, and sometimes puke. It'll be different this time! I assured myself.

And what better way to prepare for a speed goal than riding my trainer for 2 hours and 45 minutes while watching Chariots of Fire and sprinting during all the running scenes to make sure that my legs were nice and fresh. Two observations about Chariots of Fire:

1. All English guys really do look gay.
2. The only thing that looks gayer than an English guy in 2007 is an English guy running in white man panties in 1922. (Really, watch that first scene where they're running in the waves, they run like a bunch of girls!)
   

Wakeup was at 5:30 to be out the door before 6:30. Driving up to Salem it was so foggy that you couldn't see the road signs until you were right under them. The fog never burned off over the course of the morning. I was a little upset that I wouldn't get to see the sea views, but I decided that it would be more spooooooooooky to run through Salem in the fog. Unlike the last time I ran in Salem (the Witch City Sprint), we got to run past all the creeeeeeeeeepy stuff that downtown Salem has to offer: the Witch Museum, the Wax Museum, the Myths and Monsters Museum, and the statue of Nathaniel Hawthorn which gives adults nightmares for weeks about high school English classes. The only thing creeeeeeepy about the part of town we ran through in the Witch City Sprint triathlon was that this was probably the part of town where people would dump a body.

Beforehand everyone was complaining that it was sooooo cold. I was actually feeling okay in my surfing top and ninja sweatshirt (sans hood). I was happy about this turn of events, until I started running and immediately began to overheat. The ninja sweatshirt is NOT easy to get off while running, so rather than elbow a fellow runner in the face trying to pull it off I just sweat it out. You're welcome, guy with Jesus tattoos on each of his calves.

The first mile I went out really pushing the pace, sitting right at what I hoped would be my anaerobic threshold. Turns out I was going a bit harder than that, and by mile one breakfast was reminding me that this is not the way we do things around here! My smoothie was threatening to make its way out the front exit, while my intestines turned to jelly to let my English muffin out the back way. I let off a bit, but there was this chick in front of me that had very unfortunate cellulite distribution. Not only that, but Thunder Thighs seemed to know everybody on the whole North Shore, runners and spectators alike, and while I concentrated on keeping my sphincter closed she was waving to runners coming in the other direction, calling them by name, and yelling hellos to spectators watching from their porches. Pet peeve: people like that. I was NOT going to be beat by a chatty Cathy with Thunder Thighs. I now had a reason to dig deep.

We came out onto a little peninsula with some "views" of the ocean (by "view" I mean that the visibility was about 10 feet out to sea, so you could see spoooooooky looking rowboats bobbing away in the fog, waiting for the ghosts of fishermen lost at sea to come and claim the bodies of tortured runners). Here there were a lot of spectators out to cheer us on at 8:30 on a holiday morning. A morbidly obese woman stood in her driveway cheering, one family had a table set up with dixie cups of beer, another had a big bell (the kind they have on ships) and one of those horns that they blow before setting the fox free in a steeple chase, and yet another had the whole family, 7 members from grandma all the way down to grandson lined up in age order along the porch, all wearing Red Sox sweatshirts (I wonder if this was planned).

By mile 4 I'd backed off enough that I was starting to feel like I could press a little harder. That lasted about 2 minutes. What was frustrating about the weather was that, since you couldn't see 20 feet in front of you, you couldn't tell when the finish line was getting close, or even when you were coming into town. It made the last, painful mile seem to go on forever. I have no idea if Thunder Thighs was ahead of me or behind me. I couldn't see the finish line, but I began running faster and faster until I was gasping for air and my GI tract melted into a steely yuckiness. Let's get this over with! I thought. I sprinted into the finish trying to overtake a middle aged woman with a sloppy stride. I did eventually pass her, but since there was no finish line on the ground I may have just cut her in line in the finishing coral. My time: 44:33! I broke 45 minutes!!! (although mapmyrun.com clocks the course at only 4.77 miles, but we'll ignore that, I'm sure that my mapping of the course was inaccurate. Yeah, that must be it.)

There were two adjacent finishing corals, and both were really crowded, and the transition from sprinting to standing still made me pretty woozy for a minute. When I got to the front of the line to hand the tearoff slip from my number to the volunteer she looked right at me and froze with a look of horror on her face. "Uh oh!" she said.
"What?" I said, wondering if I looked ashen. All the blood was probably pooling in my legs now that I'd stopped running. She pointed right at me, mouth agape. "What?" I repeated, feeling to see if I had a booger on my face or something. Then I turned around just in time to see...

... the girl behind me in the other coral spew chunks. Blaaaaaaagh!! she went and ralphed all over the exit to her coral. Blaaaaaaaaagh!! she went again as the crowd dispersed so she wouldn't hurl on their shoes. What must have been her mother ran up to rub her back as she retched again. Don't judge, we've all been there. Now that's how you make room for a nice, big t(of)urky dinner! Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

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