She Runs by the Seashore

You know when you’re just having a great day, everything is going well and you’re feeling strong in your race? Feb. 25 was not that day.

On Feb. 25, I participated in the RRCA Club Challenge 10-Miler for the sixth year in a row. Unfortunately, I was dealing with a cold. At that point, it didn’t feel terrible when I wasn’t running, but it did feel terrible when I was.

It was an early start to the day, as always for this race. I met up with a group to carpool from Salisbury before 5 a.m., and we headed to the hilly course in Columbia, which starts at Howard Community College. This race is always tough, as we live in a pancake-flat area, but at least I’m usually ready to race. After a run the prior day, I wasn’t too hopeful for how I’d feel during a race.

The RRCA Club Challenge is organized by the Howard County Striders and offers an opportunity to compete against other Road Runners Club of America clubs based in Maryland and D.C. It’s fun to represent the Eastern Shore Running Club, of which I’m president, and to me, it doesn’t matter how we place. I just want to show up on the results. We had enough women to show up on the results as a women’s team, and we also had enough women 50-plus for the grand masters team, but we were short one man for the coed team. Either way, it’s always fun to show that ESRC spirit.

It was a particularly cold day. I prefer to run in shorts, but with temps in the high 20s, I decided to wear long pants, a long sleeve quarter-zip shirt under my ESRC singlet, a winter hat, and gloves.

The first mile was by far my fastest. The first two miles of the course are the easiest (at least for me), since they are mostly downhill. It’s also the beginning of the race, so there’s that extra start-of-the-race adrenaline and no tiredness from previous miles.

I ran the first mile in 9:56 and was near one of my teammates, Matt, for a little bit. I had to pull off, maybe to fix a shoelace or something like that, and I knew that kind of pace (or anything close to it) was not going to be sustainable for me on this day.

I really started slowing down after that, and I just focused on coming in ahead of the race cutoff time, which was two hours and 10 minutes. This race is an extremely fast one. The Eastern Shore Running Club welcomes all members to sign up as long as they can beat the 2:10 cutoff, but some teams seem to be much more competitive.

The Top 66 runners finished the challenging course in under an hour, and the Top 210 finished with a gun time under 1:10 (there were seven more with a sub-1:10 chip time). There were 656 finishers, which means that about a third of the runners finished the race with a sub-7:00/mile pace. This is not to deter anyone from running it, because as long as you can beat 2:10 (13:00/mile pace), you’ll have the same amenities as anyone else. But it is pretty crazy!

I walked the hills as needed, and I knew that I was not far from the final runner. There were times I saw the police SUVs behind that last runner — not too far from me. We lost the nearby police escort once we went onto a path after the Mile 7 mark.

The hills actually didn’t seem as bad for me this year because I was going at a much slower pace than usual. Last year, I was able to keep up an 11:24/mile average pace, and this year, my pace was 12:38/mile.

Unfortunately, I dealt with a lot of coughing and snottiness on the course, and I ran with a water bottle so that I’d have it with me the whole time. I continued to keep an eye on the time, and by the time I got to Mile 8, I had half-an-hour to run the last two miles, so I knew I could do that.

I ended up coming in with a chip time of 2:05:45, finishing as the third-to-last runner, ahead of two others. This was my slowest 10-mile race, and I was happy to be done. We got a group photo afterward and then I stayed for the results and the presidents’ meeting.

I saw George Banker toward the end of the race as he took photos; he had also taken a photo of some of our team members earlier on. He wrote an article and had photos in the Runner’s Gazette, and he featured both the ESRC photo and a photo of me running (check that out here).

One thing that always impresses me about this race is the amount of volunteers and police along the way. This makes the course super easy to follow. As in previous years, there was also a resident who opened up his home for a bathroom, which is just a nice perk, although I haven’t had to use it yet.

I look forward to returning in 2025 and hopefully getting back to my faster times from previous years and continuing to represent the Eastern Shore Running Club.

Splits

Mile 1: 9:56
Mile 2: 12:24
Mile 3: 13:06
Mile 4: 12:02
Mile 5: 12:12
Mile 6: 14:19
Mile 7: 12:02
Mile 8: 13:52
Mile 9: 12:55
Mile 10: 12:04
Last part (watch had .09): 50.6 (9:26 pace)

Final: 2:05:46 / 12:28 pace on watch; 2:05:45 / 12:38 pace on results