Thursday, May 7, 2009

Some Retractions and Corrections: Bad Results for this past weekends 5 km race and Great Urban Race

The clock as I am approaching the finish at the White Oak Classic...anyone else see that it says 24:11??? Yeah, apparently it's a mirage (at least based on a prelimary printout of the timing/ranking of runners). On a postive note regardless of time, I still came in 3rd in my gender/age category
Taking some time to eat an ice cream by a bronze sign. Note: we are not just loitering in this picture. The bronze sign was a clue we had to photograph (with us sitting on the bench) and the ice cream was a challenge we had to accomplish (we had to bring a popsicle stick back with us to the finish line). But clearly we should not have gotten so comfortable and relaxed in this picture but should have made it an action sitting shot to save some time). You will see in a few moments why this picture illustrated our failure and demise at the Great Urban Race (GUR) so well!


So it is late in the evening for me, but it is with a heavy heart that I have two pieces of bad news about my recent events. No, they did not test me for caffiene and find I had more than the legal limit (is there a legal limit for caffiene?? Because if there is, perhaps I have violated it. But alas I love the Diet Dew).

It has to do with my 5 km time on Friday and the Great Urban Race on Saturday.

If you inspect the above picture you will see my "finishers shot" (the picture I take as I finish a race). It says 24:11. Thus I publicly announced this was my finish time. Well apparently the unofficial race report that my husband had gotten ahold of suggest my time is 25:11. This is still respectable and a PR since getting hit by the car. But it is not 24:11!!! On a positive note, breaking this PR has now become a bit easier to do.

Now for the second bit of bad news. Tristan and I competed in the Great Urban Race with expectations of greatness. Hahahahaha!!! Well, okay we thought between the two of us we had two Ph.D.'s had run a few times in DC so had a basic knowledge of the lay of the land and a decent strategy (look at the answers of other competitors and figure out who looked smart and copy off them).
Unfortunately even with glasses my vision is not very good and Tristan had a lame leg so we could not shadow other competitors as well as we hoped (oh yeah and the side trip to Robeks for a smoothie, EMS to check out some mountaineering equipment and Pacers for some running equipment might not have helped in shadowing other competitors...why couldn't any of them take this 40 minute detour??!!!).

Well anyway, today we recieve the official results of the Great Urban Race via e-mail and we DNF'd!!!! What the $#%($#*????

Rereading the rules (because we do not accept defeat in our family), all I see is that we had to be back at the start/finish by 5 p.m. (which we were by most other clocks...see yesterday's post about "Tammy Time Zone" which is slightly off everyone elses time. And the rules suggest you get a 30 minute penalty for every missed clue.

What they do not ever state is that you must finish the race including accumulated penalties within 5 hours. In fact at one point when Tristan and I were about to become Lisa and Bart from the Simpson's pounding each other in Downtown DC (in front of the White House where I'm sure we would not have attracted any attention). We talked about altering our strategy to just bail on the clue finding and take the 30 minute penalty. This was about 3:15 p.m., but we were short 5 clues (of which 2 could be missed even by the GUR regulations). We decided to tough it out and got 2 more clues subsequently but this took us close to 2 hours. Had we known about the 5 p.m. and 5 hour regulation we might have changed our strategy and not DNF'd. I cannot accept a DNF next to my name.

But now I am going to attribute the DNF to Tristan because he really sucked our team down. Yup, that makes me feel better....

6 comments:

joyRuN said...

Awww, girl! Feelin' your pain*.

*Not that I can run anywhere near a 25:11 5K, or have the mental faculty to actually collect clues when running around for FIVE hours.

Congrats on the AG :)

Heather said...

I love my diet dew too. I'm starting to think I might want some during the marathon next week . . . just for a little pick me up.

The GUR concept sounds really fun! Too bad your partner had to drag you down. :)

Bobby Gill said...

i too was confused about the finish line clock at the WO Classic. apparently the red clock (which is the one i saw too) was for the 1-mile walker folks who started 1 minute after us, hence it was 1 minute slow. apparently there was another green clock that had our time. but hey, if you don't tell i won't tell and we can both tell people the red times!

Glaven Q. Heisenberg said...

Fight Teh Powah, Sistah!

No, wait, that's too hard.

Blame Tristan!

Muuuuuuuch betterrrrr ...

Runner Tammy said...

Joy,

you definitely could run 25:11. I bet you run even faster chasing Thing 1 and Thing 2!

As for chasing clues, alot of the time Tristan and I were aimlessly wandering around DC looking confused.

Heather,

Diet Dew is the best! I miss it so much when I taper (the Dew and the running) right before a 100 miler. But now I am making up for my two weeks when Dew & I were apart.

Next year I just need to find or create a better GUR team if I do it again. In grad school we would hang out and play games (because isn't that what grad school is all about). And anytime I was paired with Tristan I would refer to him as "dead weight". Clearly there was something to this nickname:-)

Bobby,

I never noticed any green clock. I say a picture never lies, so perhaps I will go back to my referencing my 24:11 5 km time. But that means I have to run a 24:10 to get a PR. That might be too fast for my little legs.

Glaven,

Perhaps I will fight teh powah. But if I did, we would come in dead last based on our finish time. Is that the kind of shame and embarrassment I am willing to accept?? Absolutely not.

In fact I am glad we were registered under my married name because I would never want to bring the shame and embarrassment to my family. They would have tossed me out in a millisecond! Well, except my sister, she would have beaten the stuffin out of me.

Maybe that could be a strategy to get Tristan to take competition seriously...beat him up like my sister beat me up.

That and blame him for everything that goes wrong!

CTmarathoner said...

Tammy --it seems funny that you would be reading about a shorter race!!!
But you are allowed to run shorter races...and your times are great with all the distance work you do!!!!
Anything for ice cream...the Urban challenge sounded very confusing --sorry about the DNF. What's up next for you??? My big black and white cat is here on my lap!!!