Race Report: Silicon Valley Turkey Trot 5K

Why did I sign up to run this race? 

Not that I've signed up for anything even *remotely* high stakes in quite a while, but honestly, this race is about THE lowest-stakes thing I've signed up for in recent memory. I am almost always traveling for Thanksgiving, and since we're staying home this year, I wanted to take the opportunity to run a local Turkey Trot just for funsies. 

A few weeks back I polled my team just to see if others were thinking about doing one and if there seemed to be critical mass somewhere (we have a number of local options here). A lot of ladies were planning on doing the Silicon Valley race in Mountain View (which offers both a 5K & 10K), so I figured it would be fun to join the group. I really, truly had no goals or ambitions whatsoever other than to run just fast enough to have fun.

And then what happened?

Generally I've felt really good running lately, but in the week leading up to the Turkey Trot, I started to struggle a bit, with my recovery score gradually sliding down through the yellow and into the red, in spite of really trying to focus on rest. In retrospect I think this was mostly about work stress and Thanksgiving prep stress, which I've learned can have a *huge* effect on how well your body recovers. On Wednesday I was feeling pretty exhausted so I decided to skip my usual shakeout run altogether in favor a bit more rest. To be honest, that choice was at least as much mental as it was physical -- a super easy 3 mile jog with a few strides thrown in shouldn't feel like much of a strain, but what was kind of a strain was planning out my day and fitting that in at a reasonable hour plus the whole rigamarole of getting dressed and cleaning up after. Mentally, I just did not want to deal with it, and it was such a (weirdly) huge weight off my shoulders after I emailed my coach to tell her. Like I said, this race had never been a high stakes thing for me but the closer it got, the more my motivation and ability to care about the outcome dropped. 😅 I was glad I'd already signed up and paid for it because otherwise I totally might have just flaked!

Race Day:

I went to bed early Wednesday night and when my alarm went off at 6:00am, I was super disoriented. Then when I finally figured out where and when I was and that I was supposed to get up and run a race, I can't express to you how deeply, deeply I was regretting my choices.

I left SF around 6:30 & parked near the finish area by about 7:30. I'd hoped to be able to park in a garage super close to the start (so I could avoid checking a bag) but there were roads blocked off and I didn't want to drive around trying to figure out how to get there, so I just parked in a lot a couple of blocks from the finish. It was definitely colder than I'd been expecting and I quickly wished I'd brought gloves!

I warmed up by jogging over to the start area in my sweats, then to the bib pickup in the festival area, and finally back to my car to change shoes. By that time I was warm enough to just throw everything in my car and keep jogging around to warm up. I got about 2.3 miles in before the officials started calling runners to the corrals.

Now, this is a BIG race for a Turkey Trot, with over 15,000 finishers listed in the results between both the 5K and 10K, some of whom run very, very fast (i.e., 5K winners running in the low 15:00s, 10K winners in the low 30:00s) and others of whom are families walking with small children or pushing strollers, distributed across six different corrals. So it's awesome that folks were divided into corrals A through F (based on the expected finish time you entered when you signed up). I think I entered like 23:00 for my finish time and was still in corral A so clearly you don't have to be all that fast to be at the front.

That said, what was not so cool was that although there were corral monitors letting people into corrals based on their bibs, there were quite a lot of people from D, E, and F corrals who for some reason were in corral A. And (of course) this meant that when the gun went off, there were a bunch of people getting shoved or run over or creating giant shuffling walls and making things incredibly difficult for people trying to run like 5:00-6:00 miles. I was not even trying to run all that fast, and I still spent probably the first quarter mile stuck behind people or swerving way out of my way in order to find some space. Grumble grumble whatever.

As with Clarksburg, my plan was not to try to shoot for a particular pace or even look at my watch at all--just to run by feel, try to find the right level of effort, and let the race be what it would be. In the 10 minutes or so before the gun, I started to feel really nervous, not because I felt any pressure but because suddenly the memory of every hard 5K I've ever run came flooding back to me in an incredibly visceral way--how awful it feels almost from the very beginning, how by the time you see that mile 2 marker you absolutely just want to die, how no matter how hard you push for the finish line once you see it, it never seems to get any closer. Just this immediate sense of "Oh, FUCK, I do not not NOT want to do THAT today!"

All of which is to say, when the gun went off and I started running, I really had a hard time convincing my body to try to run, like, actually fast. Like part of me was so worried about getting to that pain cave place and then trying to survive it for ~20 minutes that it absolutely refused to fully release the parking break. So I sort of had this sense of running, like, kiiiinda hard, but not really hard, but also sort of felt like I was shuffling along slower than my effort level would seem to imply. But I didn't even have pace up on my watch, so all I could do was try to run as fast as my body would allow me to.

OK I almost always buy the photos but $50 for 3 decent photos? 😳 Sorry.

I came upon the first mile marker before my watch auto-lapped so I just hit "lap" -- when I saw the 6:37 split I immediately went "Mmmmmmm really don't think so," like that's sub-my PR pace from 2012, and sure enough the distance on my watch only read 0.86. GPS in downtown Mountain View is not 100% reliable, but 15% error after one mile is pretty out there, so I felt fairly confident that the marker was just placed wrong to some extent.

On the other hand, something shifted mentally for me a bit after that first mile; whereas three miles had felt like an impossibly long period of time to suffer, now it was like, "Eh, two miles, I can handle anything for two miles," and I feel like I was able to pick it up a bit (though not knowing exactly what my mile 1 pace was, I wasn't sure at the time whether that was really happening or not). 

Sure enough my watch auto-lapped at 1.86 before the mile 2 marker was even in sight. (Though I didn't catch that 0.86-1:86 split at the time, it was apparently 7:40.) I hit "lap" when passed the mile 2 marker 0.09 miles later, and it was really only at that point that my body said, "Okay we can absolutely run hard for one mile without dying," and I was able to start for-real pushing. I tried not to worry about how much distance was left and instead just focus on picking off as many people as I could. (Honestly, any time I reach the end of a race able to do that, I think I have to say it's at least not a bad race!)

I reached the mile 3 marker before my watch auto-lapped so went ahead and hit "lap" again (6:51 for 0.94 miles), completely unsure exactly how far away the finish line was. 🤣 In any case I really tried to open it up at that point and sprint as hard as I could for the finish (1:07 for the last 0.17 miles, which is 6:28 pace, pretty respectable if I do say so myself).

Garmin: 3.06 / 22:56 / 7:28 pace

So, anyway, if you look at the laps on my watch, they say:

For mile splits, it recorded 7:40, 7:35, and 7:14. (It didn't record anything for the last 0.06, I assume because it's too short a distance to measure all that accurately.)

As for my official time, something somewhere is off. I have a gun time of 23:12 (believable) but a chip time of 23:11, which is absolutely wrong because it took me significantly longer than one second to cross the starting mat. But if you go by my Garmin time (which is probably *pretty* close to right) and the official 3.1 distance, you get ~7:24 pace. 

Which is more accurate? Hell if I know! Supposedly more competitive runners in the Bay Area like to run this Turkey Trot because it has a reputation for being more organized and accurately measured, but I have no idea if that's true and no way of knowing if the course was *actually* 3.1 miles or not. 

Eh. Like my great-great-grandpappy used to say, if you want an accurate 5K time, run it on the track. 🤷🏻‍♀️

My Takeaways:

• I'm glad I ripped the band-aid off and ran a road 5K, which I haven't done since June's Stow Lake debacle. It was not as awful as my pre-race 5K PTSD would have me believe and I think the next time I line up for one I will be a little more relaxed.
• I know for a fact that, physically, I could have run this race faster, especially the first two miles. How much faster, exactly, I don't know, but the above-mentioned PTSD definitely had its foot on the break and just was not allowing me to push myself any harder because part of me was absolutely petrified of going to the pain cave. So I think it ended up being more of a tempo run (at least in the first two miles) than a real race effort. But of course, part of race fitness/readiness is mental.
• I did run the last mile pretty hard, but I still don't think I ran it as hard as I could have because felt like I didn't have a good sense of how hard I could kick without running out of gas before the end. I think that's just being out of practice racing and I'll get the balance closer next time.
• After the first mile/mile and a half, I felt emotionally *much* better than I did at Stow Lake earlier this year when I had much more training under my belt but ran worse (23:30, pushing harder than I think I did at this race). I was absolutely falling apart emotionally at the end of that race and truly was just trying to survive the last mile. In this race I felt emotionally okay and in control, even though I was pushing myself pretty hard physically. So that is progress!
• I knew I was not in great shape and have not done any 5K specific training at all, so I wasn't expecting a great time, but now I at least have a point of reference. I don't have another 5K on the calendar right now, but assuming Stow Lake happens next year at the usual time, I'll have another crack at it.
• Honestly when I was driving to this race and warming up, I kept thinking, Why am I even doing this? I'm not in very good shape yet and frankly don't really feel like racing. Why am I not still in bed??? Afterward, though, it was like, "Riiiight, now the running for the day is done, 9 miles including a solid workout in the bag." For me, I think Turkey Trots are more about an incentive to get the running done on a day when it's otherwise going to be annoying to fit it in.

Up Next:

I will be visiting family over the Christmas holidays and *might* sign up for a nearby half marathon on the 23rd or 24th, not to race really but just to motivate me to get a long run in while I'm there. Similarly, I'm thinking about running Brazen's New Year's Eve trail half marathon at Lake Chabot for the same reason. But the next for-real for-real race I have on the calendar is Kaiser Permanente SF Half in Golden Gate Park the first weekend in February. Plenty of time to get into proper shape!

So, yeah; Turkey Trot 2023 is in the books! If you ran one this year, I hope it went well! 🦃🦃🦃