Overconfidence is bad, bad, bad...

We are big fans of the checklist here in the house of Oz. I used to scoff at such things, but I’ve definitely come around.

I’ve got the grocery checklist to guide the weekly purchase of peanut butter, Eggoes and other assorted staples.

We’ve got a checklist to make sure we bring all of the proper camping equipment so we have a tent, wine, cooking stuff and food. We definitely don’t want to be left foraging for nuts and berries when attempting to survive in the wilderness.

I don’t have a race-day checklist, but maybe that needs to change. If I had one before leaving the house for Saturday’s Hospital Hill Half Marathon it would have looked like the list above – and maybe it would have set off enough alarm bells that I actually would have remembered to bring a functioning brain. And, more importantly, leave the delusions at home.

Well, I didn’t. And as it turned out, Saturday was a bit of an adventure.

The running has been going so well this spring. Very well, if I do say so myself. The training has felt great. Each new race, it seemed, brought a new PR. What the heck, I thought. Let’s go for it at the Half Marathon.

The good men and women at Garmin were kind enough to help sponsor this race, which included fashioning teams of Garmin-equipped (an aside: the 405s are beyond cool….and way expensive) pace leaders.

I lined up at the start with the 1:50 pace group. At this point, if I had been in a scary horror movie, this is the part where people in the audience would start to scream: “He’s not really dead! Get out of the house while you still can! No, no, no, nooooo! Don’t open that door!”

Instead, it was a scary horror of a race reality show. Still, I could have used some audience members screaming at me. “It’s 80 degrees and what must be 200 percent humidity! What are you thinking?! This is the Hospital HILL run, remember? It has lots of HILLS! Get away from the 1:50 pace group while you still can!!!!!”

No such warning was shouted. So the horn went off. And we were on our way. At a freaking clip of about 8 minutes (the fastest) to 8:46 (the slowest) over the first 6 miles.

I chatted it up with the fellow members of the pace group. I felt superior and mighty as I heard fellow runners huffing and puffing severely. (That was some bad Karma that was going to come back and get me very soon). As we went up the first real hill. I wasn’t really out of breath. No pains. No problems. Or so I thought.

With the flick of a switch, my legs were gone. Turned to absolute jelly.

Uh oh.

“Oh yeah,” I thought. “This heat and sticky, sticky humidity is kind of ridiculous. In fact, this is really the first hot weather run of the year so my body isn’t exactly acclimatized to such conditions. I probably should have left some energy in reserve, going out slower then kicking it toward the end of the race. Whoops.”

It wasn’t just me. I noticed one of the two 1:50 pace group leaders at about the 8-mile mark. Someone saw the cute little Garmin-logoed “1:50” sign he was carrying and asked if he was still on pace.

“Not exactly,” he said. “I’m not having a very good day.”

Uh oh.

Mrs. Oz managed to catch a nasty cold. She didn’t look to be in any condition to leave the house when I walked out the door. So I was mighty surprised to see her whooping and hollering with the Ozlings just before the 9-mile mark.

I was feeling kind of low and spooked about whether I would have the energy to finish. A high-five from the littlest Ozling and a splash of ice-cold water from the bottle Mrs. Oz provided were amazing rejuvenators.

I gutted it out. My splits slowed quite a bit. It’s inevitable when you mix in some walking with the running.

The other runners on the course were awesome. With about a mile and a half to go, a runner came up behind me and shouted encouragement. “Let’s get it moving. We’re almost done.”

I jolted back into a trot. I pushed it for a while – the hill blessedly was pointing downward at the end of the race – but then began to slow just as the finish chute approached.

Another runner called out, “C’mon! Almost there. Don’t stop now!” I began to surge, noticing that my fellow runner then began to slow. “C’mon! We can both finish strong. Let’s go!,” I called out to him.

At this, we both kicked it. I had long ago given up any hope of a PR. Pretty much had given up on breaking 2 hours. Finish the race and avoid overheating so much I would get taken to the medical tent. That's not a terrible goal, right?

Then I looked up at the finish clock and saw that it said about 1:59:15.

I muttered an obscenity – can I blame it on my weakened condition and the nasty heat?—and then bolted for the finish line. I broke 2 hours with 32 seconds to spare.

So from now on I will rely on a race-day checklist. Or at least some common sense. Make sure my brain is functioning. And leave the delusions at home. Nasty hot days are not the times to pursue a PR.

Mystery runner race report

She appeared out of nowhere and started asking me questions.

“How fast are you going to run it?”

I had been noodling over some possible times to shoot for, but I hadn’t dared write them down or even say them out loud. Then it would become an actual goal, a marker to measure my success – or failure.

“I want to come in under 40 minutes,” I replied, kind of taken aback about the forward question from someone I had never seen before but answering it anyway.

“A lot under 40?” she asked, but peppering me with “Are you going to go out too fast in the first mile?” before waiting for a response to the first query.

“Yeah, probably,” I said with a laugh. “I don’t mean to go out so fast, but a lot of times it happens that way.”

She had short gray hair. Seemed to be in her 50s. She talked some more, telling me she had run the Amy Thompson run on Memorial Day in Kansas City for years and years. We talked about how we probably shouldn’t start so far up in the pack, but it was a reasonable strategy or you just spend so much of the first mile or two using up energy, and taking time while weaving through folks who probably should have found a spot more suitable to their pace a little farther back.

I know I would just block the true rabbits in the race so I try to stay out of their way at the front.

Then, just before the gun went off, she walked away. Absorbed by the crowd so quickly that I almost wondered whether the woman actually had been by my side talking. Or if I had just imagined the entire conversation.

But the race was on. And, yes, I did say, “Holy Crap!” out loud when my Garmin beeped off the first-mile split. It was under 8. Shoot. It was under 7:30.

“Easy there, mister,” I admonished myself.

But I was doing OK. I kept checking my legs. They were pumping fairly well. A little tired from recent runs, but a decent level of energy.

I dialed it back a little. No need to flame out with a big surge too early.

Started feeling a little weary around mile 3. Not long after I saw some of the folks from my Saturday running group passing out water at an aid station. They shouted encouragement. They whooped. They hollered. One guy had on a grass hula skirt and a coconut bra.

I felt a surge of energy as I laughed my way down the road.

When I needed another boost I replayed my pre-run tunes inside my head. Liz Phair’s “Extraordinary” and “Stars and Planets” were blasting through my iPod in the car on the way to the race.

“the ones that shine the brightest aren’t stars at all, they’re the planets just like us….
And from big to small, we all shine, shine, shine…”

Checked out the Garmin. 4.3 miles. Come on. Push it. Push it. Just a little more.

As I looked up at the finishing clock, I pumped my fist. Came in under 40. I Blew that PR away. By nearly two minutes.

Before leaving the house, I had looked up my time in this race last year. And my all-time fastest 8K from Al’s Run in Milwaukee a few years back. I have been feeling strong and I was thinking about pursuit of a PR.

But I hadn’t really decided. In fact I was wavering. Then I committed by saying it out loud to an ethereal runner who was there one minute and then gone.

Who was that woman?