A.M. Timed Remembering Mark The Great 5 K Race. Ran it as well. 17:00, 4th place. Susan asked me to put up the race on the featured section on the blog, and agreed to comply with the rules. I volunteered to measure and mark the course. Then she found out 26.2 was not going to time the race, nor would anybody else, so I volunteered to time it as well. There was a problem, though, as my little hack I made for my race could not handle day of race registration. But I figured I wanted it to do it at some point anyway, so why not now for a good cause? So I spent most of my spare time in the last two weeks hacking away, and by last night had a timing system that could do on the spot registrations through a web browser via WiFi LAN, scan barcodes using my Flic Microvision scanner via Bluetooth, edit the timing and the scans on the spot, and display live results through a web brower via WiFi LAN as well. Nice system, but a couple of problems. With the coding finished only yesterday it had quirks. Fortunately not too many, and with a programmer on hand to deal with them it was usuable. Unfortunately Susan put a good chunk of data into RunnerCard program, and it crashed on her last night right before it was time to import the data into my hack. Fortunately Susan's husband Jared and I were able to recover that data and import it right before the race started. Unfortunately this left me no time for warmup before the race. So I had a glorious 0.3 or so mile warmup. But that was not that big of a deal because I learned that with a stress-sensitive nervous system when I am in charge of timing, my race goes down the toilet anyway, so it was going to be a practice of surviving neural fatigue. At the start I told myself to be conservative, but still was not thinking straight and went through the mile in 5:11. That was idiotic! Would have been perfect off 8 hours of sleep, no stress, and a 3 mile warmup. Under the actual circumstances the right pace should have been 5:22, but I was too confused to find it. So I had an idea of what was going to happen next, and I was not surprised. Leg power failure/neural fatigue. Here it comes. Now this is getting interesting. Jeff and Spencer Hansen were way ahead, I was still picking off high schoolers that were falling off Holden Adams and Garth Hatch (I think) pack, but I was not gaining on the pack. So I am essentially running with high schoolers and would like a high schooler to the finish as well. But for a very different reason. Neural fatigue in many ways behaves like a lack of aerobic fitness. You start out at a certain pace that you think you can maintain, and then you fade. The difference is that with neural fatigue you cannot surge at all and you have no kick. If the problem is aerobic you can make surges up to a minute, and you have a kick. And the HR patterns are different as well - in the neural cause HR peaks around 1.2 miles into the 5 K race and then drops some. In the aerobic case, it keeps drifting upward all the way to the finish until you start to vomit or dry heave.
So at the beginning of the second mile I moved into 5th place. 1.5 in 7:58 (2:47). Not good, but expected. Not as bad as it could have been. At least I am still doing 5:35 pace. 2 miles in 10:46 (2:48, 5:35). Expected. Caught up to Garth (I think that's who it was, tall guy with an interesting looking back kick, kind of Mike Evans style). He picked it up, and pulled me until I almost caught up to Holden. Then Holden heard us coming and hit the gas, as Garth dropped back very quickly. That's what I am talking about when I say neural fatigue/vs not enough oxygen. You can surge. I was actually expecting him to surge pretty hard, or at least have the ability, and he did not disappoint me. Now when aerobically unconditioned, surging comes at a high price. Oxygen debt makes you vomit/dry heave, and Holden started doing that about a minute into his surge to prove my point. So I was able to gain on him and get within a second. However, slowing down allowed him to pay some of his debt off, and now he was able to run fast enough to hold me off. 16:25 at 3 miles (5:39), and 35 seconds (5:27 pace) for the "kick". So I would have called this a textbook race at least for myself and the runners around me. Nothing out of the ordinary happened that did not have a good explanation. Jeff ran a great race, though. End of 90 mile week, 10 mile warm-up, 16 miles the day before, and he runs 4:57 - 4:58 - 5:02 - 0:29 most of it alone on a loop course.
Handled the race timing afterwards, discovered a couple of system bugs, of course, worked around them. The most annoying part was that wireless reading from the scanner was dog slow. I was not noticing it with 20 bibs, but it got very painful with 400. At first I thought it was the interference from all the gadgets, but now I am inclined to think it is a bug. Need to investigate. Also a process glitch, not computer system related - did not account for the fact that some of the barcodes may not be scannable. So that created a bit of a mess, but we eventually worked around it. I have thought of a great solution for this for the future. Use Nokia 770 Tablet along with the scanner, and have it transmit everything to the laptop over WiFi, then you can enter unscannable barcodes manually without having to touch the keyboard on the laptop that is being used for timing. This also eliminates the need for the laptop to talk to the scanner at all, so you can be scanning further away from it. Afterwards ran the course twice with Jeff in 46:58, and then ran some more to make the total of 10.
P.M. 2 with Benjamin in 16:30, 2 with Jenny in 18:11. Julia ran 1.5 with us in 14:06. Then 0.5 with Joseph in 5:13.
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