The Nike Half Marathon - Negative Splits

Today in Manhattan the New York Road Runners Club and Nike put on an excellent half marathon. It consisted of a loop and then some of Central Park, exiting the park and continuing down 7th Avenue to Times Square, over to the West Side, along the Hudson River, past Chelsea Piers and Ground Zero, and finishing down in historic Battery Park.

Team for Kids was running the race as part of a 16 mile run. We were to run 3 miles before the race and then start at the back of the pack and run the half marathon. Some of the faster members and I decided to skip the 3 miles and enter our preferred corral locations and start the race from there.

Many of my pace group members had more legitimate reasons than I to skip the extra 3, since they had run 12 or more miles the day before at Bear Mountain. I skipped that run for a couple of reasons, mainly because I am trying to avoid downhills as it causes some discomfort on my jaw in the wake of my surgery. I had the same procdure done back in March and the constant pounding of running on the road while training for and then competing in the San Diego Rock n Roll Marathon in June had caused me problems which I won't get into. This is why they had to essentially redo the surgery, under general anesthesia this time, 2 weeks ago. So on Saturday, at 6:30 a.m. when the person who was giving me a ride called to say our car was bailing due to inclement weather, I decided to stay in bed and rest for the half marathon. I suppose I could have arranged to get picked up by one of the other people going, but then I would only be able to run up the mountain and would have been forced to walk down it. I heard tell later that they ran sub 6:00 miles down the mountain, which could have caused the surgeon's brilliant work to come undone in a very painful way. Plus it would have caused my friends to wait 36 minutes for me to come back down before they could have left, assuming I could safely execute a 12:00 pace. Finally, my surgeon is going to take the stitches out on Monday, which I'm sure will hurt plenty, so back to bed I went.

In order to do optimally at the race I felt I had to skip the 3 miles beforehand, as doing the 3 from what I understood would put us in the back of the pack at the start. Ironically, the 3 mile run concluded in ample time whereby we could have gotten into our preferred corrals, so we would not have been impeded by a large crowd of 10,000 people for the first mile. We still would have suffered the competitive disadvantage of having run 3 miles beforehand, but 16 miles were on tap in the training program, so perhaps that would have been the better way to go. The 3 miles were a bit hilly, incorporating Harlem Hill, the largest one in Central Park, but it is really not that significant, nothing compared to Bear Mountain (and would have been uphill for the most part, so not too tough on me).

Here are a few considerations that drove my decision to deviate from the program, which I don't do lightly as I am a believer in it. One was, the race was being televised by the local ABC affiliate, WABC-TV, Channel 7. I assumed the commentators of the race were given some kind of information regarding Team for Kids, so I figured the more chances they had to see us out on the course, the more free publicity we might get. Actually I assumed nothing, I wrote an email to one of the TFK administrators asking if they had spoken to WABC and let them know our story, didn't hear back but I hoped that they did. We wear bright green uniforms, so I would have hoped that somebody on the team would be spotted during the race and the commentator would have said something to the effect of, "There's a TFK member, they are running the NYC Marathon in the fall to raise money for kids. To find out more to support this great cause, check out www.teamforkids.org." Who knows if anybody even watched the broadcast or not, as it started at 7 a.m. on a Sunday morning, but anybody who is a big enough fan of running to be tuned in might be intrigued enough to look us up and donate a few bucks.

My second reason was I wanted to race it to see how well I could do (ok, that doesn't really help the team at all). But in some respects, I think I do enough in terms of helping other members of the team, and attending other people's fundraisers. There is an interesting dichotomy, in one respect you are trying to help the kids as much as you can, and I think in that regard few would argue I pull my weight. And then there is the marathon training program component, which is largely personal in nature to the team member. I like to help my team members in that regard as well, at practices and even in races. I actually stopped in the marathon last year to help a guy in my pace group who was struggling and ran with him from miles 19 to 24 until he was able to actually run off on his own and finish ahead of me. We both broke 4 hours, so I have no complaints about helping him out, I like to think he would have done the same for me. So every once in a while I like to do something that I think is in my own best interest, and today I wanted to see how hard I could run at the end of a race.

My plan was pretty simple, and that was to start slow and finish strong, while attacking the hills in Central Park. With hills early and none late, I figured there was no real reason not to go hard up the hills. On marathon day it's a different story, as the last 6 miles is predominantly uphill, so you don't want to kill yourselves on the earlier hills. But the trail on the West Side is flat as a pancake, as was 7th Avenue and 42nd Street, so I made it a point to pass people on the hills in the park.

I also had to slow down on the downhills, which there were quite a few of, since we went in a clockwise direction (the two largest hills in Central Park are Harlem Hill and Cat Hill, both of which are uphill only when going counter-clockwise). One added thing I focused on going down hill was to let my arms dangle by my sides. There is no real reason to pump your arms going downhill the way you do when you usually run, so it is a good idea to give them a break on the downhills and conserve energy for the uphills and flats.

For you non-runners out there, a "split time" is a time for a smaller portion of a race. At today's race they measured splits at 5K (3.1 miles), 10K (6.2 miles), 15K (9.3 miles) and then of course at the end of the race, which was 13.1 miles. So the last distance where you could calculate a split was the final 3.8 miles. Split times are valuable tools for judging your performance. In the Team for Kids program the philosophy is to achieve negative splits, meaning you run faster in the later stages of the race than you do at the beginning. I had never really achieved this before. If you've been reading this blog you know my splits in my first marathon were terrible, 2:02:32 for the first half, 2:52:34 for the second half. That is very ugly. That is a case of running way too fast for the first half and then dying during the second half, being reduced to walking in tremendous agony towards the finish.

There are two ways to run negative splits. One is to run very slow, so slowly that you don't fatigue yourself at all, and then speed up at the end. The other way, which is what you want to try and achieve, is to run as fast as you can while still being able to increase your speed at the end. That is a delicate balance to try and strike with not too much margin for error, but it's what you have to strive for if you want to be the best you can be. In the second method, you are likely to experience some degree of pain and fatigue in the last part of the race, at which point your determination, will and heart come into play.

At the end of races I always find myself debating whether to try and push myself to go faster. It is often difficult to gauge what you are capable of doing in the final stages. There is a risk that if you push too hard you can pull something, or vomit, causing you to lose time or even not finish at all. At one race in the past year I tried stepping it up the last 0.2 of a 6.2 mile race and very nearly threw up. I had to slow down a bit until the feeling subsided and I missed my time goal by a few seconds. Sometimes that is a legitimate concern, but most other times I found myself complacent and tired and content to just breeze in without trying to get that "kick" at the end.

Typically after those races where I didn't push myself to the brink at the end I was pretty dissatisfied with myself. So recently I resolved to always push myself as hard as I could towards the end. Today I did the best job I ever did of that. I resolved to run the last 3.8 faster than any of the other splits. Right about the time I crossed the mat for the 9.3 mile split, it started raining. It actually felt nice and kept me cool, allowing me to skip the last two water stops. As I approached Ground Zero there was a bagpiper on the side of the road playing "God Bless America", which also gave me a bit of a lift. After that, to inspire myself to keep pushing, I kept thinking about Steve Prefontaine, the great American runner from the '70's with an iron resolve and some of his famous quotes:

"To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the Gift."

"Somebody may beat me, but they are going to have to bleed to do it."

And then I focused on the people surrounding me, speeding up when I heard footsteps to keep people from overtaking me, and targeting people in my sights who it looked like I could catch.

I had never run a 3.8 mile race, since I don't think they even exist, but here are my personal records for comparable distances, expressed in minutes per mile pace:

3.2 miles (a 10K lengthened 0.1 miles to fit the course in Prospect Park, Brooklyn): 6:28

4.0 miles: 6:36

Many people would think it impossible to "PR" (personal record) at a distance after having raced 9.3 miles, but here is what I was able to do today:

Splits in minutes per mile:

First 3.1 miles: 7:14
2nd 3.1 miles: 7:15
3rd 3.1 miles: 7:43
Last 3.8 miles: 6:28

I actually did the 3.8 miles at the end today 16 hundredths of a second faster than the entire 3.2 mile race in Brooklyn.

So I was very happy with myself, having established a PR for the half marathon distance of 1:32:31 (overall 7:04 pace) I finished in 434th place out of 10,294 finishers, beating 95.8% of the field. But more importantly I did a negative split, and was able to step up and overcome the pain and fatigue and run close to my top speed for an extended distance, 3.8 miles. My legs are sore, but no pain or bleeding from my jaw, so overall I'm feeling great about the whole experience. If I am going to qualfiy for the Boston Marathon this year and be able to run it with my friends who are already going to be in the race (KC, Amy, Ben, Allyson & others who may still qualify yet), it is going to require me to run to the limit of my physical ability and beyond at the end. I am going to have to average a 7:29 pace for 26.2 miles, something I attempted 2 months ago in San Diego but failed. But I think I passed a big test today in terms of will and determination, and running a smart race in terms of pacing, so now I just need to focus on racking up the miles without getting injured and I will have a fighting chance.

"A lot of people run a race to see who is fastest. I run to see who has the most guts, who can punish himself into exhausting pace, and then at the end, punish himself even more. Nobody is going to win a 5,000 meter race after running an easy 2 miles. Not with me. If I lose forcing the pace all the way, well, at least I can live with myself." - Steve Prefontaine