The race that wasn’t
After running some 5K races in 2022, I ran a 10K in January, and although it’s always nearly impossible to imagine only being halfway done when you finish a race like that, the thought did occur to me that I could probably train up to do a half marathon. It’s been a fun quest for 2023, the weekly scaling up of distance, albeit in very tiny increments. Training is of course made more interesting when you don’t really know what you’re doing (I opted for a slow scale-up that built lots of endurance but ultimately left me injured and, once healed, with only weeks to get back into a 10+ mile shape.)
Still, I was ready.
So were 7000+ other runners who were gathered in San Diego, many of us staying at the race host hotel on Harbor Island, and all of us having attended the pre-race expo where we picked up our shirts, bibs, and swag. And then Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency due to the impending rain and mild winds we would be enduring (after the race window, mind you), and the race lost its permit and had to cancel. As a reminder, this was hours before the race was set to start.
It’s a huge bummer when you are ready to run and this happens. It’s a bummer because I was so focused on completing this goal. And because keeping my body—a body that does not find running anywhere near the realm of easy or natural—at this level isn’t sustainable, so I would need to scale down and then ramp back up for another race somewhere down the road. It’s also a bummer because there was just some on-and-off rain during the actual race time, certainly do-able.
I realize the effects of Hurricane Hilary as she rolled through were unknown, and that it’s probably a good thing that caution ran supreme. There will, after all, be other races. And so I am reminded once again that life very frequently throws curve balls and remains impossible to predict or plan adequately for. Today I kicked off a new training program, another half marathon in mind, and I’ll move forward feeling only slightly phony about wearing the expo shirt and hat for a race I never got to run.