Race recap: San Antonio 13.1

I ran the Rock n’ Roll San Antonio Half Marathon this weekend.  To say I ran it would be a joke… I made it through.  It was humid, hot, whatever… I’m not blaming this one on the weather, or the equipment.

I ran the same course last year in 1:45ish.

This year, 2:00.

What. The. Fuck.

Let’s recap the list of FAIL for this race:

• I started on a paleo challenge a week before the race.
• I did not eat breakfast race morning. I always eat breakfast race morning.
• I left my gel in the car.
• The start line had NO FOOD, and the bathrooms were ill-equipped, at best.

Lovely.

So I get to mile 4 and finally find a bathroom that has what I needed.  Great.  Back on the course.  I’m starving.  My body is starting to tell me that bad things are going down, and I know I need to figure something out.  I can taste salt in my mouth, and around mile 7,  I start getting that oxygen-deprived feeling in my ear like I get at the end of Fran.  Not cool.  There was not enough Cytomax and water and banana people to get me through this one.  And the Cytomax and water was giving me side stitches, which made running even more fun.

I needed real food, which I never got for the whole race, and I paid for it.

There are many lessons here… certainly some around preparedness and the need to establish a “race ritual” and follow it.  But I think the biggest lesson here is there’s a fine line that you need to draw between a strict paleo diet and the ability to fuel during a race.

I can’t very well pull out some deli meat, 9 almonds, and some berries at mile 7 for a snack.  So I can’t let myself get so far to the real food side of the world that a gel would hurt.  But I do need to find a more paleo-friendly gel, because my next 13.1 is going to not suck like this one did.

Thoughts?  Grok didn’t have a D-tag stuck to his shoe and he wasn’t timing himself in the hopes to run the 13.1 miles out to the river and back faster than he ever did before.  Eric did, and was.  And failed.

Everyone has a bad race or two.  This is my first, and I want to never have one again.