If that doesn’t sound scary… add to it that this was on a 200-meter track… YEP.

I am sure you’ve heard of the Armory Track – they host amazing track events but always too fast for me to even attempt to show up. This was a three-day event, with corporate and all sorts of relay teams, that wasn’t super intimidating for the new or casual runner. A good way to hang out with your office buddies where you can claim you run a marathon at the end. And not one of those “5K marathons”…

Here is the event website, in case you want more info for next year. For me, this was a last minute decision, given I had run the Cherry Blossom 10 Miler 4 days before, and I was NOT ready to race anything, let alone step on a fast track.

But hey, who says no, right?

Friday they had a 2:30 pm session and a 6:30 pm session. We were in for the post work race and we all showed up at 6. There were 7 of us, and 221 laps of 200 meters, so we were all doing about 10 laps of 200 meters times 3.

I was the first one to go in my group. Not intimidates at all:

That start was insane. We were all QUITE aware of where we were in the line. EVERYONE, including me, took off WAY TOO FAST. And I never take off fast. My first lap was 42 seconds. My average was 50, so you can imagine how quick that was: insane.

My plan was to lap my watch every lap so I’d know. But because I was indoor, and I had never used my watch inside, I set it up on “treadmill”. When I finished the lap one and I tried to lap, it didn’t lap. OH NO. Below is my “now what?” face…

The first few laps were ok actually. Because I had no idea what was coming. See?

By the way, 10 laps in a 200 meter track sounds like no big deal, but OMG, at lap 4 I wanted to hop off. It was painful. And horrible. And I can’t count laps to save my life. At some point, my teammates yelled THREEEE, I yelled back TWOO, then on the next lap they said ONE… I had no idea what was going on. I did what they told me and I ended up with NINE laps, UGH.

Once my ten (actually nine) were done, I tagged my teammate Emily and run off to sweat off the track. It was hot and sweaty and sticky and all those things. Should I have a gel? Who knows? I had to wait now like an hour for my next 8 minutes of pain.

We cheered all our teammates until we had scratchy throats.

Soon enough, I went again. I started “slower” so I was happy for a bit…

Oh, remember last lap when I didn’t feel like throwing up?

but of course, again, by lap 5 I wanted to die again… What a great loop of sprint-joy-miserable-agony-sweat-rest and start again… I guess THAT is running in a nutshell, isn’t it?

Around 10/11 pm, we all finished. We all get on the track, do a lap together, get medals, a team picture, a beer, food and free medal engraving.

Can we just talk about how my new marathon PR is 3:21? hahaha, as if!

That was fun and insane and fun. By the time I got home, it was midnight and I was so hyper from all the sprinting and all the caffeine (because I wasn’t sure what to eat) that I had a hard time falling asleep. I was a tired mess the next day. My average pace was 6:46 for a total of about 3.75 miles. Not bad. Or bad if think I was out there for like 5 hours… On the other hand, how often do you get to run and race with all these people that are not your pace, as a team?

Never.

PS: my new PR is 3:21

HA