Calumet City Half-Marathon**

I've developed somewhat of a routine over the past 3 years on how I taper for the Chicago Marathon. I train normally until two weeks out from the marathon, and then every year two weeks out from the marathon, there is a small half-marathon by my house that I run, which officially marks the beginning of my taper. I run the half at an all-out effort and use it as a benchmark for my fitness. The past three years that I've done this race, I've managed to PR at the half-marathon distance, so it has always served as a good morale booster. This year, I didn't know what to expect since I had just set my half-marathon PR two months ago, and have had a difficult go of it since then. But a routine is a routine, so I decided to do the race regardless. As has become the norm lately, thing didn't turn out quite as planned.

It was a perfect morning for running, with temps in the lows 50's and sunny and clear skies. For me, if I could order a day to run on, this would be it. It's a shame really. This is normally the weekend that the Chicago Marathon is run on, but due to some scheduling conflicts they had to move it back two weeks this year. Hopefully, we'll get equally good weather in two weeks…or at the very least I hope it doesn't snow. In talking with the race director right before the race, she casually mentioned that she had to make some last minute changes to the course due to construction. I didn't like the sound of that, but they have always done a good job with this race, so I decided it was no big deal. Ha.

My biggest goal for this race was to show some restraint in the first few miles and not go out too hard. If you've been reading any of my race reports from this year, you can see that I've pretty much always just go out hard and tried to hang on at the end. Sometimes I can, sometimes I can't. However, with such a short recovery window after this race, I really didn’t want to beat myself up too much during this race, so going out relatively easy was even more important. I hit the first mile in 5:40 and the second in 5:34 and at that point, I decided I was fine. I was feeling good and was running in second place, about 15 seconds behind the leader and about 10 seconds ahead of the third place guy. I'll admit that I really wanted to win this race. In the three years that I've run this race, I've come in 3rd, 2nd, and 3rd so with a good run, I knew that I should be right around the winners. I figured if I could keep him in sight in these early miles, I would take my chances later on in the race.

Things continued to go good through mile 6 with comfortable splits of 5:40 and 5:41 and then a 5:50 mile which was into the wind. And then things got interesting. There were two lead vehicles for us to follow. One stayed the #1 runner and the second car hung back and stayed with me. So navigating the course seemed to be no problem. Just follow the lead vehicle, right? Wrong. At one point, the car drove up ahead to block traffic on one of the busy intersection and I just continued to run straight. Eventually the car drove up ahead of me again, and turned down a side street. About half-way down the side street, he stopped and as I ran past the window of the car, he yelled out to me, "You missed a turn!" Ugh. To say I was upset was an understatement. After the mess at Dances with Dirt, where I got lost in the woods and ran an extra 10 miles on one leg, this was the last thing I needed right now. So I went up the window and asked what do I need to do to get back on course?!? He said, I don't know, let me check. So he got on his walkie talkie and said, "This guy wants to know what he has to do to get back on course." Pause, no response.

Did I mention that a race is going on right now? Well it was. While I was sitting there conversating with the guy in the car, the #3 runner just moseys on by me. I yelled at him that we were going the wrong way, but he had on headphones and seemed to be oblivious to the big red truck stopped in the middle of the street, so I let him go. I turned around and there was the fourth and fifth place runners heading down towards me too. Eventually the guy in the car says, "They say you should just keep going. That's the #2 runner who just passed, so we'll figure it all out at the finish line." Grrr. I felt like saying, actually that's the #3 runner. I'm the #2 runner, or at least I was. So I took off. Then after about 10 seconds of running, I said this is stupid and turned around and decided I was going to just walk off the course.

Leading up to this race, I was really stressing to myself that I wanted to be mentally tough in the marathon. If something doesn't go as expected, I want to stay tough and not let the first negative thought do me in, but here I was in my final tune-up race and I was walking off the course because something went wrong. Luckily, all these thoughts blasted through my mind as I was walking off the course. At that point, I decided that a hard 11+ miles was better than nothing, and I should try and salvage the day. I took off after the #2 guy, who now had about a 45 second lead on me.

So with the goal of running for a PR pretty much out the window at this point, my new goal was to catch the #2 guy. I slowly started to reel him in and finally at the 10.5 mile mark, I caught and passed him. Of course that was the course 10.5 mile mark. For me, it was about the 9 mile mark, since are little snafu cut off about a mile and a half off the course. I pushed hard to the finish and my last two miles were my fastest of the day with a 5:31 and a 5:29.

I didn't know what to expect at the finish line. As soon as I came across, I told the race director about what happened and she said she knew and that the top 8-10 runners all did the same thing. She said she would give a refund of our money if we wanted and that she was very sorry. She said the results would stand and that she would take our average pace and add that on to our final time to give a 13.1 time for placing purposes. At that point, she said well, at least you won. I said no, I didn't win. There was someone ahead of me. She said that he actually walked off the course once he found out about the wrong turn, demanded a refund and left. Now, if this was a $60 race I would expect more, but for the $20 race fee, I give the organizers a little more leeway. Everyone was trying their best and mistakes happen.

I don't know. I took the win (and the accompanying $50 Home Depot Gift Card), since all of the leaders did the same thing, but I would have much rather had an accurately run half-marathon time. I was encouraged that I was able to run two 5:30 miles to end the thing and that I was able to catch and pass the second place runner late in the race. And really, when I think about it, maybe only doing 11.5 miles saved me some of the wear and tear that the last mile and half would have caused. Yeah, I know it's a stretch, but it's all I got. I don't even know what my time was when I crossed the finish line, and with the minute that I sat out on the course debating with the lead car, I don't even know if it matters.

So sorry to Chris, who reads this blog and asked me about this race a few months ago. I gave it a ringing endorsement, saying it was really low-key and well run. Well, he went off course too, and then was pressed into course marshalling duties after he finished since there were several potentially life-threatening road crossing that were unmanned when runners were coming down the home stretch. In my defense, I also told him that it was a PR course, which it definitely was yesterday. Well at least for the first 10 runners or so it was.