Race Report: The Giant Race 10K 2022

Why did I sign up for this race?

The Giant Race is a mainstay of the San Francisco road racing scene, historically offering a pretty flat & fast (not to mention scenic!) 5K, 10K, and half over two days (though this year there was no half), but for one reason or another I've never run it. Actually I know one reason I've never run it and that's because of the price. The 10K cost me $90 and the 5K was $75, and those were the early bird prices before service fees, optional bib mailing, if you want the swank VIP package, etc. 💸💸💸

Especially when I first moved to SF 14 years ago, that was farrrr to rich for my blood. This year I was willing to swing it for a few reasons:

• I wanted to get in a mid-distance race this summer but my dates were pretty constrained due to dumb amount of travel over the summer & early fall & a bunch of weekends already booked up with stuff, so my options for local races, especially in the 10K range, were pretty sparse.
  
• The start/finish is a very quick and easy BART ride or a very reasonable 3-mile warm-up jog from my house. No driving or getting up butt early required!
• Related, no hotel needed, making this one actually *cheaper* than two of the four races I ran this past spring. (These two reasons alone pretty much clinched it for me.)
  
• The course has historically been pretty flat & fast.
• In terms of favorable August weather conditions, SF is about as dependable as it gets.

 

And then what happened?

Some good training. Some missed training due to work travel. But then some more solid training in August! In mid-August I was feeling really good -- getting the mileage up to around 40 mpw, running longer, faster workouts, and frequently shocking myself with the paces I could hit for longer intervals in relative comfort.

Something else that happened: It took a very long time for the course map to be released. I'd actually emailed the organizers about it before signing up in late June & received a response saying they were still determining the courses for this year's races and that the info would be released soon.

As a participant, it's a *little* concerning if there is no official course ~8-9 weeks out from the race, but I know enough race directors to know how much cat-herding is involved in organizing a race, particularly issues related to permitting in an urban area that is as busy and popular as the Embarcadero in San Francisco, especially as events try to get back underway after a two-year hiatus. I don't know the whole story and there could be all sorts of reasons why the course wasn't finalized in June. I wavered a bit about signing up but finally just did it because a) I had a pretty limited window when I could race and couldn't find another close option, and b) it seemed to me odds were good that the race would just go up and down the Embarcadero again as it always has; "I'm sure they're just working out the details!" I thought. "I'm sure it will be FINE!"

So I waited, and waited, and waited...and then finally, on August 12 (nine days before the race), there was announcement about the course. We learned that rather than both races being out-and-back as they have been in the past, the 10K would basically be the 5K course with an extra loop. 

 

Now, as I said, I don't know the whole story, here. I'm sure there were probably permitting issues involved and I'm assuming that the race organizers did the absolute best they could under the circumstances. That said, this type of course setup at a race like this can be problematic for a few reasons, as we will see below.

The last piece of setup we need is a quick recap of the week in terms of training and energy levels. On Sunday, I had a great 15 miler, including four miles at half marathon pace/effort, then a day off, an easy day, and then another great workout on Wednesday (warm up, 3 x 1200m @ ~7:05-7:15ish / 400m jog, 3 x 200m fast / 200m jog, cool down = 9 miles total). I felt strong and fast on these workouts and continued to feel surprised by how fast I was running, how relatively comfortable it felt. I felt like I had lots of gears and was often needing to hold myself from pushing just a *bit* faster because I wasn't really used to those gears being there.

Then on Thursday, it's like I just crashed. I woke up feeling completely exhausted even though I slept 9+ hours, and was barely able to function enough to work. I had a five mile easy run to do and even just a couple minutes in, I was seriously questioning whether I would make it even one mile at 10:00+ pace. I seriously, seriously considered calling it at two miles but something inside me kind of feels like three miles is the shortest distance that's even worth running, so I powered through with some walk breaks & made it to three hard-fought miles. Seriously, I could not remember the last time I had felt so bad trying to run, and I couldn't come up with any reason for it.

Friday was a day off; I slept late and didn't do anything stressful, and then took Saturday pretty easy other than an easy three-mile shakeout (which I combined with going to pick up my bib at the Ball Park). The shakeout didn't feel amazing but it also didn't feel terrible, and by the time I finished I was actually feeling a lot better. I did nothing but chill out for the rest of the night and even managed to get myself to bed at a reasonable hour, so I was feeling pretty optimistic that whatever had happened to me on Thursday, I was getting over it and would be ready to race Sunday morning.

Race day:

I'll come back to the logistics & stuff in a minute, but first let's just get the race out of the way. I started warming up around 7:40 for the 8:00am start, just a bit of additional jogging on top of what I'd already done getting to the Ball Park, then a few quick strides and drills. The more I moved the better I started to feel, and my strides were actually feeling pretty good. I felt light and quick on my feet and wasn't having much trouble getting up to 10K pace.

Speaking of 10K pace, my strategy was to have a little faith, believe in the fabulous paces & workouts I'd been running lately, and actually try to go out at 7:10-7:15 pace. If that ended up being a little too ambitious, I'd know soon, but I though, hey, 7:20-7:25 pace would still be okay--especially since last summer my two 10Ks had been closer to 8:20-8:30 pace! Literally nowhere to go but up, here. (But...I still really, truly believed I could run under 45:00 if I had a good day.)

Well friends, I did NOT have a good day! The first mile felt good -- it came in at 7:12 and I thought, "Cool, so far, so good." But it wasn't too long into the second mile when I suddenly felt overcome with intense fatigue. My quads started burning and I started to really struggle to turn my legs over. It was 7:22 for that second mile, and by the time I was very far into the third mile (7:39), I was seriously doubting whether I could actually finish the race. (Actually that's a lot how I felt in the 10Ks last summer, except then I was running even slower 🤣.)

As I approached the Ball Park at the end of the first loop, there was definitely a part of me that was tempted to take the 5K split straight to the finish line, but ultimately I did find the will power, somewhere, to head back out on that second loop, where I encountered a new problem. 

For context, this isn't a super-serious, super-competitive race; it mainly attracts families and fun runners, including a lot (like, a LOT) of walkers and run-walkers, and there is no corral organization or suggestion by pace of any kind, or even any kind of gentle suggestion to maybe not start at the front if you're going to walk. Also while the first part of the loop was on the road which was closed off, the return trip was on the Embarcadero sidewalk which was very much NOT closed off, and not laned in any way to help organize people in the different distances.

If you were one of the faster 10K runners (and somehow miraculously in this race I was), you found yourself in the second loop faced with packs of 5K walkers, some pressed together to form walls of bodies that blocked the entire course, *as well as* members of the general public. So while I'm not claiming I was ever going to have a fast second loop, I think it's fair to say that it would have been significantly faster had I not had to spend that loop weaving in and out of clusters of walkers and sometimes actively tapping them on the shoulder to be like "Excuse me, coming through!"

Is this the walkers' fault? Of course not. Their job is to go where they are directed to go. But it would have been nice if the race organizers had given some sort of instruction about 10K runners and the second lap, or divided the course into different lanes or something for Lap 1 vs Lap 2. I don't know. But I feel like this could have been figured out ahead of time.

In any case, both miles 3 & 4 were 7:39, and mile 5 was a race low at 7:55. But I think I got a little bit of a mental boost in that last mile & managed to pick it up a bit for a 7:44. Now you may be wondering about the last .2, but SURPRISE! There was no .2. This was in fact NOT a 10K race as advertised but a six-mile race. Which was really just the cherry on top for me because, if nothing else, I would have loved to have update my 40s PRs page with something under 47:59 minutes for 10K. But no.

Official: 6.2 miles / 45:27 / 7:20 pace
Garmin: 5.99 miles / 45:27 / 7:35 pace

You know it wasn't a competitive race because that business was good enough for 7th woman & 2nd in my age group, lol:

If you want to do the math, that extrapolates to something like 47:15 for a full 10K.

So, yeah; this one is kind of a bummer because my workouts have been really excellent lately and I felt like I could expect a much better race than this. What is it the pros are always saying? "I don't feel like my race performance was a true reflection of my fitness"? That's pretty much how I feel. I feel like my fitness is much better than a 47:15 10K, and for some reason I just fell into a hole of fatigue & exhaustion in the later part of the week before the race, & though I tried to rest and recover as much as possible before the race, I don't think I ever fully recovered, or at least not enough to run more than about 1.5 good miles.

Hanging out on the baseball field post-race. Hey, I tried! 🤣🤣

Other Logistical Race Day Stuff (Or, Other Reasons My Morning Was Kind of a Cluster):

Originally my plan was just to carry nothing, wear nothing extra, jog to the start, run the race, then jog home. Particularly since there is no bag check unless you pay extra for the VIP add-ons ($35). Buttttt the more I thought about the logistics of the morning, especially considering I wanted to get there a bit early (as opposed to rolling up *right* before the race started) and the things I really *couldn't* avoid carrying (phone, keys) and how I didn't really want to jog there & back in my race shoes, I eventually decided to suck up the extra $35 so I could safely check my stuff. 💸💸💸 (The other option was driving the 3 miles (!) and dealing with/paying for parking anyway (!!!), which I REALLY did not want to do.) 

In the past the money might have bothered me more, but running for a team now means that a lot of my race fees are comped, and not having to drive or get a hotel for this race ironically makes it one of the cheaper ones I've run this year anyway. Also these days my attitude is kind of "life is short and sometimes saving a little money in order to have a shittier, more irritating/uncertain experience isn't really saving you anything."

Let's just say my plans did not work out for a number of reasons. Plan B was to BART to Montgomery BART (about a mile from the start), jog that, check my stuff, finish warming up, then jog back to BART after the race as a cool down. But it turns out that if you are planning to BART somewhere early on the weekend, you should check that there is actually a train that will get you there on time. I didn't discover this error until I was already *in* the BART station and a BART cop informed me. So, my only real option at that point was to call a Lyft. Add another $25 to that race tab! 💸💸💸

I found T to say hi and give her her race bib, then went to warm up and drop off my gear. I found someone who looked like a race official to ask where to check my bag and he pointed to the other side of the stadium. So I jogged around there and found the giant bag truck with about 15 bags in it so far and asked the women there if this was the bag check. She looked me straight in the eye and said "There is no bag check."

I blinked and held up my VIP bracelet and said, "Uhhhh for VIP I think there's supposed to be?"

She grinned slyly as if I had cleverly answered her riddles three, "VIP, that's the magic word!" Which was just....weird. While I was standing there undressing a bunch of other people came up to try to drop off a bag and she did the same to them--stood right in front of the almost-empty bag truck, looked them straight in the eye and said, "There is no gear check. Sorry."

"But the race staff over there said the gear check was over here?"

"Nope, sorry. There is no gear check."

Eyeing the very obvious bags in the very obviously nearly-empty gear check truck over her shoulder. "Are you serious?"

"Yep, sorry."

Now, I am sure this blessed volunteer was just doing what she was told to do. And that is not her fault. *However*, my feedback for whoever gave her this instruction is: This is just such SUCH a bad, bad way to do things for so many reasons.

(1)  Almost ALL road races of any kind have *some* sort of bag check situation. When the start and finish are in the same spot, it's nearly unheard of to NOT have a bag check. When this is the case, they are usually quite vocal about it ahead of time in many, many emails. Which is to say, you *aren't* going to have a bag check for some reason, you need to make that abundantly clear. It needs to be plastered all over the website, in big, bold letters in every email, and repeated constantly at packet pickup. Otherwise people are going to (very reasonably) assume there's a bag check and plan their morning accordingly. I only knew because I am a meticulous planner (failure to check the BART schedule nonwithstanding) and couldn't find any information on the site so I emailed them to ask directly.

(2)  I really don't see why they couldn't have had a bag check for everyone. It's not *that* big of a race and that giant VIP bag check truck was about 90% empty. Maybe I am missing something but it doesn't seem to me like it would have been that difficult.

(3)  If there's only a VIP bag check, make sure that *that's* what race officials tell people when they ask. Not "Oh the bag check is over there" (what many volunteers near the start were saying) or "Sorry, there is no bag check" while standing right in front of a very obvious bag check. Just tell people what the actual situation is.

(4)  Here's the kicker. Right as I was leaving to warm up about 20 minutes before the start, a race official came over to the bag check truck and told the woman standing there, "Okay, we can be a little looser about this now and let anyone check their bag since there's plenty of space." Like??? You really could have just done that from the beginning, and then I wouldn't have had to pay $35 to be *sure* I could check my bag??? 

 

So, yeah. Overall assessment? My first impressions of this race were not great. The course and organization in particular left a lot to be desired, and especially given the outrageous price tag, I'm not inclined to run it again even though it's close to home. Ah well, live and learn.

What's Next?

Big things, friend. Big things. Keep an eye out. 👀