Meltdowns and Comebacks

There was a sweaty train ride, there were a few breakdowns, and then there were some races yesterday in Brasschaat, Belgium. All in all, things ended up okay, but not before they started off miserably.

We trained from Amsterdam to Antwerp. Antwerp was about 10 kilometers from Brasschaat. The train ride was awful. I guess they don’t believe in AC over here, because I was sweating like a pig. Then some lady sat right across from Maggie with two huge bags and wouldn’t move them up to the overhead compartments, it was a disaster. There was supposed to be someone from the meet in Antwerp to pick us up and take us to the track. Sadly/predictably, there was not. After minor freaking out, we found the 640 bus. It dropped us off about a ½ mile from the track around 1 hour after we were expecting to get to the track. Maggie had to warm up immediately. Turned out, we didn’t care about all that jazz and ended up racing our butts off: Maggie PR’d in the 8 in 2:03.6, Elizabeth PR’d in the 15 with a 4:09 (5 second best!), and then I finally raced instead of time trialing and it worked out pretty well.

So I ran 3:41.39 for 5th place in the race. It was supposed to go out in 2:23 through the 1k, but the rabbit only made it to about 700 and the leaders passed the 1k mark in 2:29 or so…leaving me somewhere in around 2:30. It should also be noted that I was an idiot at the start and let myself get shoved around like crazy and found myself in last place 100 meters into the race (they put like 14 or 15 people on the start line of a 6 lane track, it was chaos). But even with all the shoving and everything, I stayed pretty calm and just moved myself up throughout the race. At 400 to go Bumbi took the lead (which he would end up not being happy about), and then we started picking it up. There was still a pack of people because it wasn’t too fastly (I know that’s not a word but it sounds right) paced and it was very crowded on the back straight and around the final curve. I tried to bide my time, but found myself with really nowhere to go even though I had a lot left the last 100. I was able to pass some people, but not quite as many as I would have liked. I wish I would have tried going wide around the turn just to see what could have happened. But you live and you learn and I was pleased with how it went. 3:41 with a 55-56 last lap, gotta like that!

Also, I remembered that it was fun to beat people. I set out wanting to win the race, but I was able to beat some people that I really wanted to. I was finally focused on that for the first time all year instead of trying to run a fast time so that I could get a shoe contract. I sometimes forget that competing is the best part of this whole thing, and yesterday it felt good to beat some of the people that I did. Too bad 4 guys got me, but next time I’ll be coming for them.

Enjoy the pictures, still trying to figure out one more race in between now and the mile I am running in Dublin on the 21st…hopefully it can work out. Gonna be a tourist for a little this week, too bad the Dutch couldn’t win the game last night.

Let’s Go!

The track as we were getting ready to leave

A belgium beer waiting for the bus home.