I am a cult member

What would you call a group of people who all wore the same shirt, similar shoes, similar caps? What if they all met at an early hour in the woods or a park to conduct mass exercise and other superstitious rituals? What would you label a group which moves en masse like lemmings or birds, whose members gather at small tents to partake of suspicious morsels of freely-distributed health food bars and small cups of a suspiciously-Kool-Aid like drink? What would you conclude if this activity was capped all done in a soaking rain?

You'd call it a cult.

So that must be what NYRR is: a cult. 'Cause all us idiots - several thousand of us - were standing out there in a light drizzle munching on Cliff's new powerbar things and drinking samples of some Gatorade or something and waiting, patiently, for the race to start.

Today's 4-miler was one I would have gladly skipped if it weren't for the fact that I'd paid good money to be there. As it is, I skipped my planned 4-mile warmup loop, partly for time, and partly for comfort's sake.

The run was miserable. I've run in the rain before a couple of times last summer, but only light rain and only when ending up the run at my house. This time, though, I stood and ran in the a healthy soaking rain for 90 minutes or so. I started off, OK, with only wet feet, since I had some rain gear. But after conquering Cat Hill (yay!), I had to ditch the raingear. It was old and coming apart anyway, so no great loss, but from that point on, I discovered something: clothes get heavy when they get wet. And constrictive.

Note to self: when running in the rain, wear less clothes, not more.

Dealt with the shin pains again for the first two miles. Lost a few minutes to stretching and if it weren't for that, I would have beaten my last 4-miler's time and come in at or under 10:00/mi pace. As it is, I was glad the pained ebbed at mile two and I was able to keep up a steady pace from there on out.

In the second half, however, I found myself working just to stay abreast of a racewalker. This man could flat move! Better than 10-minute miles, if my own pace was anything to judge by. He made me work for it, I tell ya.

Finally got to the finish line and immediately headed for baggage. Once I got to the subway, I took the few minutes before the train to change into a dry top and jacket, change socks (even though my shoes were soaked, wet socks are better than soaked socks), and contemplated the various ironies of life: one of them being that I have hundreds and hundreds of miles riding a naked motorcycle through rain, sleet, wind, hail, snow, and fog - but mostly rain. I've learned to carry dry socks when it's raining outside, but you'd think I'd have learned to bring dry PANTS as well.

My shower at home never felt so good.

I've spent the last few hours putting together an Excel file with a race database, fronted by a sheet of PRs. You can see the PRs in the sidebar here. The file is complex, as I want to be able to simply add the next race at the bottom of the database sheet and have all the data show up properly, particularly if I PR again. If you want to examine the file and how I've got it set up, you can find it here. Right click to download, I think.