Race Report: Harbins Park Trail 10K

I am straight up heel striking in the picture. Oops!

I swear I spent my entire weekend in the car or on the trails.  This was a rare weekend where I could be on the go since The Mister had the morning off Saturday and the day off on Sunday.  I love my child to pieces but so often on weekends it is just the two of us.  That makes it difficult to do non-child focused activities.  I hate dragging an unpredictable toddler around to 3-4 places and will do everything in my power to avoid that situation.  Every now and again, I need some “mommy time” outside of my regular workouts.  It might be sort of selfish to some but it keeps me sane.

I drove out to Dacula AKA the other ends of the earth (or I-85) to run the Dirty Spokes Harbins Park Trail 10K.  If you live close to Atlanta and are interested in trail running, I cannot recommend the Dirty Spokes/XTERRA races enough.  I don’t know what the difference is between the two organizations but they share a website so check out listings for both “Dirty Spokes Trail Runs” and “XTERRA Georgia.”  All of these races are very well organized, very well marked, and hosted on nice groomed trails.  You should have little fear of these races if you are new to trail running.

Harbins Park is a gorgeous little multi-use park in Gwinnett.  It has nice paved bike paths and wooded running trails.  The weather was great on race day and I felt perfectly ready to get in an easy 10K.  In hindsight, I read my training plan wrong for this race and I should have “raced” it.  Oh well.  I really wanted to save my energy for my Sunday long run out on the Pinhoti trail.

Since I did not have it in my head to race this one, I think I did an admirable job of practicing restraint from the beginning.  We ran about 3/4 of a mile on flat asphalt trail and then headed into the woods.  I purposely throttled my pace from the start.  I try to do that when I’m not sure how hilly the course will be.

The course was overall very, very fast for a trail run.  At the beginning it wasn’t really rolling and there weren’t even any big hills.  It was just nice sweet shaded single-track with the occasional tree root.  I wanted to really pick it up but I held back for the first 3 miles.  I still found myself passing a few people.  I can’t help it because sometimes you just don’t want to break your stride.  Also, I find it more tiring to run at a slower than comfortable pace just to avoid breathing down someone’s neck.

After the halfway point of the race, my pace started to slow dramatically.  I really had to go to the bathroom even though I went just prior to the race.  So frustrating!  All I could think about was how badly I needed to go.  Every bump on the trail, every mini-descent, every footfall seemed to make my problem worse.  I refused to stop and take care of business because there were way to many people out there in close quarters.

I realize now that I tend to screw up the hydration thing when I have a long drive to a race.  When you have a 1.5 hour drive and get thirsty it is kind of hard to deny yourself water.  I’m going to have to work on arriving way earlier than needed so I can have time to join the bathroom line twice.  Why is the women’s bathroom line always so freaking long?!?

I tried every mental trick I have in the book to focus on something other than finding a bathroom.  You would think the situation would make me run faster just to get it over with but that wasn’t the case.  I started to slow way down after Mile 4 and spent a good deal of time walking.  It helped to not jostle things around.  I didn’t really mind since I wasn’t “racing” this one.

The trail through the woods ended and I continued alternating running and walking on the asphalt trail.  I really was kind of tired at that point.  I picked up the pace when I saw the final curve to the finish line (and the bathroom!).  I was happy with my 1:01:55 finish because I wanted to keep it under 1:05 minutes.

Compared to other racers, my time kind of sucked.  I lost my typical midpack status in this race.  The horror!   I finished 11th out of 17 in my age group and 149th out of 223 overall.  The female winner finished in something like 40 minutes which is a 6:32 min/mile.  That is probably the fastest 10K result I’ve seen in a trail race.  This really was a fast course!

I’m going to come back next year, use the bathroom twice pre-race, and smoke this one.