Boulder to London

Upon arrival in Peso da Regua, we promptly found the expo. It was quite possibly the worst expo I’ve ever been to as I don’t think there a single vendor of sports or running equipment, no swag bag was given out, and it took a bit of effort to figure out where we were supposed to go to pick up our numbers. Fortunately (as with the rest of Portugal), everyone was super nice and we got our numbers, t-shirts and directions for the start the next day.

The run was scheduled to start at 11:00, but we were advised to come into town by 8:00 to find a place to park. We sort of heeded the warning and showed up around 9:00 and had no difficulty parking. I think I broke a few Portuguese traffic laws as I pulled a few u-turns looking for a place, but it all worked out in the end. After changing into our running gear, we walked over to where the busses were picking people up and hopped on to head up to the starting line. In addition to the half marathon that we were running, there was also a 10k. Both runs started at the same place which turned out to be a few miles up the road on a dam across the Douro River.

We were pretty early, so we wandered around, found some water and eased our pre-race jitters with a few trips to the sani-hut. Sani-huts must be a unique thing in Portugal as people weren’t quite sure how to operate them. One might think that this is a pretty simple concept, but there are a few critical steps that the crowd had great difficulty with. First, sani-huts are unisex…inevitably the crowd wanted to form a male and female line, which essentially halves the capacity when the line is either largely male or female. Second, lock the door. While a simple thing, this was something people struggled with. Incidentally, it’s not what you would expect…no one actually walked in on anyone. Rather, the line would form in front of a sani-hut with the green (vacant) signal showing, but people would assume someone was inside and simply wait.

With 11:00 approaching (latest start time for a half marathon ever), we ventured back to the start line where we witnessed a number of people warming up quite seriously. We joked about being last place, picked out people we though surely couldn’t beat us, and tried to calm our nerves for the last 10 minutes or so before starting. The starter finally got the crowd back behind the line and pushed those running the 10k towards the back. We noticed that there were pretty much only pretty serious looking runners in the half marathon…

When the gun went off we started slowly through the crowd. The half marathon course turned left off the dam while the 10k runners went right. We started out with what felt like a reasonable pace and were delighted to see the course meander down a gradual slope that followed the river. We were cautious about the slope as we realised the course would at some point turn back on itself and we’d have to run up any hill that we ran down. I try not to ever look behind me in races, but rather focus on the runners ahead of me. At one point I did look back and was surprised to see that there were an alarmingly few runners behind us. At the 7k mark, the course did turn back around and I noticed that there were actually only about 20 people behind us with the last place person less than 1k back. He happened to be a guy that must have been about 70 years old and he wore two knee braces.

We fought our way back up the gradual slope and did fairly well until mile 10. At this point we’d been passed by about 10 of the people that were behind us and got stuck next to a guy that kept burping in a rather disgusting way. At this point I told Melisse that I needed to walk. She slowed down, offered words of encouragement and got me going again a kilometer later. At this point in the course, we were about to cross the river and head through town. It should have been an easy run, but my legs were done. We alternated walking and running and even got called out by a few old people that were supposed to be cheering along the course. We thought we were approaching the finish line when we realised the course went further and then doubled back again.

After getting my hopes up for the finish, this disappointment was a little too much for me. I went back to walking while Melisse carried on. We had to go down about a quarter of a mile before returning back to the finish. At this point, we had been passed by most of the other 10 people that were previously in our rear-view mirror and put my ipod on to provide some motivation and check the distance to the finish line. The strange thing was that the clock at the finish line read 1:58 indicating that we were going to come in close to the 2 hour mark. This was very surprising to me as it was way too fast for the pace I thought we were keeping. I put on my ipod to provide some motivation and check the distance that my nike + was reporting and found that I still had over a mile to go? When I finally crossed the finish line around 2:08, my ipod was still reporting that there was a mile left in the race! I’m not sure what that actual distance run was, but I was grateful to see that they were handing out wine at the finish line. We grabbed our wine, headed back to the car and enjoyed a fabulous afternoon at Quinta da Barroca.

Here’s the output from my ipod…notice the nice flat pace until mile 10 when I fell apart!