What Not to Eat 15 Minutes Before an 18 Mile Run...

Many of you probably already knew this, but I learned the lesson the hard way. Stayed out too late again the night before the Hot Chocolate 15K, which was turned into a 10 miler, which my friends and I were going to convert into an 18 miler since we plan on running Miami on January 28th. So after getting 4 hours of sleep I found myself in the tobacco / Red Bull store downstairs, and after grabbing a small Gatorade I thought to myself I needed to eat something if I was going to be doing a long run. I looked around through the various treats they had for sale, and this one seemed the most substantial and least disagreeable (a sad commentary on their wares).

Walked over to the park, met some fellow TFK'ers, and started eating the Honey Bun. It tasted good, very sweet, which I like. I was commending myself for my excellent choice. Surely I would run 18 miles without a problem.

The first 6 miles or so were ok, kept it at a 7:15 pace or a little faster, which was my goal for the 18 miler (I can run 10 miles much faster than that). I never ran a 10 mile race before, but my PR for 15K is a 7:00 pace. That was another crushing near miss, I wanted to post a sub 7:00 pace, needed to go about 5 seconds faster. I tried to ratchet it up in the last 0.3 that day but felt like, no, knew I was going to hurl, so had to slow it down considerably. I actually made it to the finish without vomiting, but narrowly missed my goal.

So here I was taking it relatively easy (I am faster than I was 6 months ago when I did this PR, I'm sure I could have done 6:45's without trouble based on my last 2 races). At mile 6 or so I started getting a bit sick to my stomach. Around this time I burped, as I had been doing a little more than usual this race. But this burp brought with it a little bit of vomit-like liquid from the digestive tract, not sure what the technical word for this is, but my brother calls it "burping up a donut". So that happened and I tasted the honey bun and thought to myself, "Hmmm. Maybe that wasn't such a good idea." The rest of the race I kept the pace but wasn't too happy about life in general. In the last half mile my teammate Phillipp passed me, and of course I couldn't let him get by without a fight, even though he wasn't doing 18 and did not have a Little Debbie Cake as his pre-race meal. I'm fairly certain Phillip wasn't out until 3:30 the night before singing Johnny Cash songs at a bar in midtown Manhattan. But I still figured I'd try to catch him. I snuck up behind him and drafted him for a while, but then he saw my shadow in front of him and looked around to see me there and sped up a bit. Then this other joker comes by and tries to pass Phillipp which makes him go even faster. But I kept close enough to beat him by chip time, so I accomplished that part of my idiotic mission, but of course I was ruined at the end and couldn't do the extra 8 miles. I don't think the little race really affected that outcome, the die was cast when I downed the honey bun, my stomach was reeling from that fiasco all day.

Lessons learned:
- Sweet pastries are not a good pre-race meal.
- Never do anything that you don't ordinarily do before a race.
- If you want to do extra mileage in conjunction with a race, do it before the race starts and not afterwards. That way if your competitive fire gets the better of you during the race, you don't have to worry about exhausting yourself too much to tack on the extra miles at the end.