Race Report: NorCal John Frank Memorial 10 Miler 2024

Why did I sign up to run this race? 

NorCal JFM10 is a PA race and when I'm able I'm trying to run as many of those as I can to support my team. (We get reimbursed for PA races as long as we run 8 per year.) Also, there was nothing else I was super excited to run this time of year instead and we had a pretty good size group going, so it just kind of made sense.

And then what happened?

From a training/staying healthy perspective, things actually went mostly according to plan. (I know, 🤯.) I had kind of accepted that my training might fall off a bit during my December travels, which did in fact happen (and also, I got a nasty respiratory virus which did not help, plus holidays, which, y'know, holidays). 

But after that I was able to pretty much jump back in! I believe the only run I skipped leading up to this race was the four easy miles I was supposed to do the Thursday before the race (due to travel woes). THIS NEVER HAPPENS! It helps that I had minimal work travel and the only weekend I had to be out of town was the weekend I spent in Tahoe (where getting the running done is usually pretty easy). Of course I was supposed to run Kaiser SF Half on Feb 4, which didn't happen due to weather, which meant a down week without a hard effort. Since then, though, I've been able to get right back at it without any interruptions which is always nice.

On the other hand, the week leading up to the race was rather stressful and I found myself constantly crunched for time, and had pretty poor sleep in the three nights leading up to the race. So while my fitness was pretty decent, I think, I did not arrive at the starting line feeling super rested and ready to go.

Race Eve:

In no traffic you can get from SF to Redding in 3.5 hours, but if you wait until 4-5pm, suddenly you may be looking 5-6 hours thanks to Bay Area rush hour traffic. There was also a lot of wet, nasty weather forecast for the weekend which does not tend to help matters.  A teammate of mine from the South Bay and I were both "team let's get to Redding before dark," so she picked me up at about 1:30pm and off we went, across the Bay Bridge and past Father's House in Vacaville and ten million blossoming cherry trees, and rolled up at Fleet Feet to pick up the bibs just a few minutes after 5.

After checking into our hotel, I went out for my shakeout run, which in theory was 30:00 easy plus 4 x 30 second strides. And friends, it was COLD! I had on longsleeves and tights and a hat and I still wished I'd work gloves and an ear muffler (though, not badly enough to go back to the hotel for it). We were in a sort of right-off-the-highway-kind-of half-industrial area without tons of good sidewalkage, plus it was getting dark, so I mostly just made laps around the block. Also, the wind was a bit bananas--when I tell you I spent most of the run clutching at my hat and once even had to run to retrieve it, I am not exaggerating.

Given the lack of light and longer open stretches and not-great footing, I did not attempt the strides, just jogged for thirty minutes and called it good. Other things that I am not exaggerating include how NOT great I was feeling, which I blame on three days in a row of travel, stress, and poor sleep. Even ten minute pace felt much harder than it should have and I was not sad to have an excuse to skip the strides.

After dinner with some of our other teammates, the evening in the group chat was spent mostly agonizing about Saturday's forecasted weather (temps in the high 30s/low 40s with a "real feel" of 30-32F, rain (maybe a lot of rain), snow (?!?!?!), and even a chance of thunderstorms (??!!??!!)) and what sort of layers (now that we were all in Redding with whatever we had previously packed) might be the right choice. 

Knowing I run warm, I knew I should probably err on the side of wearing less than my lizard brain wanted to, but every time I looked at the forecast I started having PTSD flashbacks to Boston 2018 and cursed myself for not bringing a rain jacket. Tentatively I decided on a super light black longsleeves I could wear under my singlet, gloves, and an ear muffler, with the nuclear option of adding my warm-up jacket under the singlet if things were truly dire. Finally around 9:30 I laid out my stuff for the next day and took my sleep-deprived ass to bed.

Race Day:

Here is a nice thing about this race: It doesn't start until 10:00am (🤯). I was particularly jazzed about this given my recent lack of sleep and didn't get up until 7:30am, positively decadent for race day. We met up with our teammates in the other hotel around 9:20 to hand out bibs, then all made the one-mile trip from there to the start area. It was cold, but miraculously there was no rain and no wind and I really did start warming up a bit as I jogged around. Ultimately, though, I stuck with my plan of wearing the longsleeves and ear muffler, though I did ditch the gloves, and in retrospect I think all of that was the right choice (though I might have been fine in just the singlet too).

Pre-race

After ~1.5 miles of jogging and some strides, I lined up kind of near the back of the (very small) pack. (I don't think anyone but PA teams runs this race lol.) My only pace goal was to run by feel; I kind of hoped I could run sub-8:00 pace and didn't think that would be unreasonable based on my workouts, but there were no stakes here either way.

A few weeks back I'd looked at the course elevation map and gone "Eek that looks a bit hilly," but then, taking a closer look Friday night, I convinced myself that it actually wasn't too bad other than a long, sustained, rolling-but-definitely-gradually-uphill section between miles six and eight. 

I planned to take the first couple of miles to settle into a comfortable-but-challenging pace, and for the first mile I really felt like I was doing that. It felt good and doable and like something I could probably handle for 10 miles. But then I saw my first split (7:30) and thought "Ohhhh this is not good." 😬

Has my training been decent? Yes! Did I feel like I had made many fitness gains since November in Clarksburg when I ran 8:40 average pace? Also yes! To the point that 7:30 was a reasonable race pace? Absolutely, definitely no!

I really tried to take my foot off the gas a bit in miles 2-3, which worked (7:56, 7:51), but another thing that happened is that I started to feel like absolute, utter crap. Now as man know, there are many different, distinct *kinds* of crap that one can feel like in a race; this is one that I've come to identify as bone-deep fatigue, the kind of short-term fatigue you get from a few bad days or weeks of just not recovering well either physically or mentally or both, whether due to stress or poor sleep or not enough carbs or just plain overdoing. It's this feeling of being out of control, sort of disconnected from my legs and like they are just doing their own thing, like having absolutely no gas in the tank while also wearing lead boots. It is utter panic, a trapped-animal feeling, with your mind flashing all the red alert warning lights--DANGER, this is a bad bad BAD situation for you and you need to get out of it ASAP--and also the exhausted, light-headed feeling of just wanting to stop and lay down and go to sleep. I remember distinctly feeling this way in this race a year ago, despite pretty solid training, and then feeling that way again basically all spring and summer.

📸 Thanks to my teammate's husband @willzone1 for documenting my time in a serious pain cave

So, yeah--I was pretty quickly in the "Just survive this at whatever pace possible" place, doing my level best to talk my freaked-out animal self off the ledge and ignore how my pace kept inching down and down and down (8:17, 8:22, 8:40), though part of that was due to hills. (There weren't actually a ton, but MAN I felt the ones there were.) The panic subsided a bit after the halfway point, though I knew the longest hill was miles 7-8 so I had to give myself a big pep talk before that (8:15, 8:20). With two miles to go, I felt much calmer, knowing that while I didn't seem to have enough gas to run any faster, I wasn't crawling and could definitely make it to the finish (8:21, 7:59).

Here, have some more, why not

So. In the balance, that all works out to 1:21:39 for 10.04 miles or 8:09 pace. (Only the finish was chip timed so I'm sure my official time was a bit more since I started near the back.) Not what I hoped I could do based on my training, but given the lead-up I had to the race, maybe also not surprising that I just didn't have a ton to give. Still, to feel like crap and run 30 seconds per mile faster than in Clarksburg is progress and I will take it.

For some reason we decided to hike up this crazy hill to cross the highway rather than taking the pedestrian underpass???

After a brief cool down, those of us immediately headed back to the Bay stopped off for brunch at Lulu's Eating and Drinking Establishment, which was like if a greasy spoon diner and a dive bar had a baby and served the most delectable bottomless mocha hot chocolates man has ever experienced. 10/10, would recommend, no notes.

By the end of the second one I was almost warm inside again. 😅

What's next?

Train, baby train. Race-wise, I am doing nothing until April 14th, at which time I maaaaaybe hopping into another 10-miler in NYC while I'm traveling. It's two weeks before Eugene so it should be good timing, both in terms of gauging progress after this race and getting in a last hard effort before the half.