The joys and frustrations of small races

I went up to San Francisco again today for a DSE race, a 10k in Golden Gate Park. I've always loved small races; the Rattlesnake Master 5/10 in Urbana was one of my favorites in college, because it was a small, fun, low-key race and because the course, looping around Meadowbrook Park, was the running equivalent of home-court advantage. Rattlesnake was where I set my 10k PR of 35:54 in 2004, running alone behind only a pace cyclist for the last eight of the race's ten kilometers.

At today's race there was no pace cyclist, but fortunately I had someone to chase. I ran the first few miles alongside Grant, the dude that beat me last week, and there was another guy that took his first mile in 5:20. By the halfway point we were packed together, but the other guy dropped off after that. Turns out he was tired from running a sub-16 minute 5k the previous day (!). Shortly after halfway Grant started to pull away, and I gained and lost ground on him in stretches, but the losing stretches were significantly longer than the gaining ones. The last mile or so was a real struggle; we'd gone out pretty fast (after the race Grant said we were at 16:58 at three miles) and I was just about dead.

The course had rolling hills, but nothing nearly as steep as last week (explaining the much faster pace for a race twice as long). And for maybe the first time ever in a race I thought I handled the downhills very well. I ran under control and with good form and almost always gained ground on the downhills. I also think that overall I did a good job of running efficiently early, even at the fast pace, and I'm really, really glad that I didn't jump out front and push the pace when I was feeling good on an uphill around the 2-mile mark.

So I didn't have a watch with me and didn't catch my time right at the finish, but I figured I'd hear it when they handed out awards. I heard them call out the time of the guy that rabbitted as 36:26, and I finished well ahead of him, so I figured I had easily set a PR. But during awards they gave his time as 35:18 and mine as 35:15. Which doesn't really add up, because I was way more than three seconds ahead. And I finished more than 3 seconds behind Grant (probably 15 seconds), so it wasn't that there was a bogus extra time at the beginning. And that's the frustration of small races. I am in the unusual situation that I know I ran a PR today but now I don't know what my PR is! I think I'll call it 35:18. I'm really pleasantly surprised by whatever I ran; I didn't think I was in better shape than I was back in '04. And it's possible that I'm not, and that 36 seconds is just the difference between running out front and chasing someone.