photo: RunAgainstHunger.com
I live in Croton-on-Hudson, a hilly town. I’m sure there are towns around here with more hills. But we’ve got some good ones. And the Harry Chapin Run Against Hunger manages to hit two of the worst! This was the 30th running of this course, and my 2nd time through. I had run it as like my 3rd race ever in 2007 and found the course very hard. And as I didn’t really know much about racing or running or suffering, and enjoyed the run, I ran it in over 50 minutes.
I’ve come a ways, but I’ve never been able to run this race since. In 2008, while training for New York, I pulled my hamspring and had to sit the race out. Actually, I ran the one mile fun run with my daughters, which wasn’t much fun. And wasn’t much of a run. In 2009, I was running the Bay State marathon on the same weekend as Harry Chapin, and so here we are in 2010 and I was ready to go again.
The course has a 912′ climb in it, with two giant hills. Central Park also has two big hills in it, but somehow its 779′ of climb feels so much easier. Or that’s what I keep telling myself.
But more than anything else, this is a town race — although people come from all around, it’s a great day to be a runner from Croton, and a lot of the folks here in town run it. I saw many dads and moms from town, some kids I knew, some fellow Taconic runners. Runners are always part of a community, but for this race that community — more than ever — overlaps with the one in which I actually live.
I lined up a row or two back from the front, and saw a lot of runner friends. Doug, Tom and Jessica from the Taconics were right with me, as well as a bunch of familar faces from the town. Many of us were wearing shirts that were made for the race, a mememorial to Max Ivenitsky, a Croton resident and first class athelte who lost his battle with Cancer just over a week before the event. Max was a fast runner who enjoyed this particular race, and as someone fittingly put it, he ran the course many times over through this tribute.
The gun went off and we were off. The first mile is fairly flat, but the field thinned out quickly. I did a 6:36 mile, which was pretty much where I wanted to be. The second mile has a big uphill but then a great downhill, but I paid more for the uphill than I was able to gain on the way down, and had a 6:59. Mile 3 is along the route of part of the Taconic saturday run, mellow steady uphill, 6:41 for me. Mile 4, I paid. Slow steady uphill overall, but a lot of rolling. 7:05. Did pretty well in mile 4 — 6:47. And then in Mile 5, the final horrible uphill, 7:29. No great numbers in there, but I felt like I gave it my all.
43:11 by my watch, average pace of 6:53, which I’m happy with on this course. 15th place overall, 3rd place in my division. My 2nd award ever!
On a run with friends I started to get a bunch of crap from one of my buddies about a 43 anything at my age. But I ran the race I ran, and I kind of enjoyed it. Every race has its lessons, and I learned a lot from this one. I have to train more on hills — I think I’ve done five hill intervals in my life, and although I run through hills all the time, learning to push it hard in a race would be valuable.
That being said, it was great to be out with the folks from town on a fall day. Rock on.
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