Hooray! Yesterday at the "Turkey Burn-Off" 10 miler — thanks to the kind help of Coin Club Comrade KS who ran the initial five with me — I was able to achieve a heretofore elusive goal: negative splits. I actually covered the second half of the distance significantly faster than the first, and in good comfort. Instead of the usual boring (maybe to some, but not to me) tabular presentation of mile-by-mile paces and cumulative time data, here's a quick graph:

"Pace" on the vertical axis is in minutes/mile and is depicted by the red diamonds. The blue line is a least-squares fit to those ten points and shows an overall average acceleration of ~7.5 seconds/mile/mile. (Extrapolating that I should reach the speed of light after ~87 miles ... hmmmm!)

The Montgomery County Road Runners Club, as usual, put on a superb event. Amazingly enough there was even plenty of good food left for slowpokes like me who reached the finish line almost 2 hours after the race began. Some aides memoire re the experience:

• Parking was tight when I arrived, about 15 minutes before the gun (note to self: get there earlier next time, as the organizers recommend).
  
• The weather was perfect for a brisk jog, perhaps 40 degrees Fahrenheit, with intermittent strong winds that pushed thick clouds in front of the sun and then slid them away again.
• The course was delightful. It meandered for five miles on narrow roads through Seneca Creek State Park, a forested area near Gaithersburg that featured rolling terrain and a large lake. The ten mile event simply followed the pathway twice.
• Friend KS and I met on a soggy field and exchanged excuses early: too much recent running, nagging injuries, not in the mood, poor training, etc. With those preliminaries out of the way we lined up behind most of humanity and set off, deliberately slowing ourselves by taking a 1 minute "walk break" every 5 minutes.
• The crowd began to thin after about a mile, where a woodpecker rat-tat-tatted from one side of the road. We cheered the leaders whenever a loop in the course brought them back to meet us; they were averaging ~6 minutes/mile in spite of the significant hills.
• KS and I chatted continually, sharing anecdotes and commiserating with one another. Mile 3 was our slowest because we chose deliberately to pack walk breaks into it from either side — analogously, KS noted, with the common business and governmental accounting practice of pushing all the bugetary bad news into a single fiscal year.
• The park was dense with holiday season decorations, little lights on metal frameworks which, KS explained, were part of a drive-through evening show (admission $10/car). A water station was strategically located so that runners passed it near miles 2, 4, 7, and 9. The volunteers there, and everywhere along the course, were enthusiastic and helpful.
• Stiff breezes near Clopper Lake blew KS's hat off at about the 4.2 mile mark; he had to hurdle a roadside barrier and scramble down a slope to snag it before it tumbled into the water. I teased him about leaving the course, but we agreed it was ok since he was actually going farther rather than taking a shortcut.
• Around mile 4 KS and I began to be concerned that the leaders in the 10 miler would embarrass us by finishing before we got to mile 5. Neither of us could compute very effectively by that point — mental arithmetic being one of the first skills to go during a race — but after some head-scratching we figured that we would probably make it in time. As it turned out we did, finishing at ~53 minutes by my stopwatch, almost 7 minutes ahead of the speedster threats.
• At the 5 mile point I went through the chute and had my time recorded, then looped back (covering an extra 10 yards or so) and continued. I felt good and began skipping some walk breaks and cutting others down to 30 seconds, with a bias toward taking it easy on uphill segments of the course.
• I passed half a dozen fellow runners who had perhaps set out too vigorously during the first part of the race and were now paying back their debts. We chatted and encouraged one another. (Hi Betty!) I had enough energy left at the end to blitz (relatively speaking) the final few hundred yards and finish looking (if not feeling) strong.

My official results (slower than my watch times by ~15 seconds, since KS and I began that far back in the pack; note that most people chose one or the other event, not both):

5 miler: 148th place, behind 83 men and 64 women, 14th of 15 males in the 50-54 year bracket — finishing in 53:14.

10 miler: 141st place, behind 89 men and 51 women, 12th out of 13 males in my age group — total time 1:41:49. An excellent ramble through the woods ... (see also EdwardsFolly (13 Apr 2003), Marathon in the Parks 2003 (11 Nov 2003), MarathonGraphs (17 Nov 2003), ... ) — Just out of curiosity; how would your second 5 miles have placed in the 5 miler linup? - RadRob

According to the official results table at http://www.mcrrc.com/racing/race03/03tbo10-5M.htm it looks as though 48:35 would have been in 120th place, behind 72 men and 47 women, 11th of 15 in my sex/age group — ^z
— TopicRunning - TopicPersonalHistory - TopicHumor - 2003-11-30
— — I bear some responsibility for the erratic pace over the first five miles and some credit for the better pace during the last five.
The first half erratic pace is very similar to my pace during the Turkey Chase, where I burned (if you call a 9:30/mi pace smoking) off the first two miles, struggled during the middle and picked it up during the end (of my 5 miles). Not being as experienced of a runner as ^Z is the cause of that, but maybe I'll learn as I run more.
At the risk of sounding negative, the acceleration during the second five miles may be more the result of running slowly with me than speeding up over the second five miles. In other words, I may have held ^Z back from an otherwise quicker pace over the first miles had he been running alone (but at the loss of my companionship - can friendship be measured in time?), in which case the best fit line would have been flat, or at least flatter.

All my past experience indicates that if I go too fast at the start then I suffer much more later on (and the resulting net time is far worse) ... so no, you didn't hold me back! ... and it was a great learning experiment, eh? Now if we can tune it a bit more during future races ... ^z
— I second Mark Zimmerman, Thanks to all the organizers and volunteers at the Turkey Burnoff. Mark, congrats to you for finishing the 10 miles. You may feel slow, but I often feel like the only one in the club who runs a 12+ mile pace. So ten miles in "almost 2 hrs" is fast to me, because it takes my almost 2 1/2 hrs to do 10 miles! Even the 10 min/mile pace of the BOPers is fast to me. That's partly why I didn't do the entire 10 miles and did 5 instead. It's hard always feeling like you're holding everyone up from going home and getting back in bed :) But even if I'm last at the club races, I'm still running and I'm proud of that! Doing my first 1/2 marathon this Jan too - and I just started running this April when I joined MCRRC's Beginning Women Runners program. So see you at the races! :)
— BRAVO!!! Just getting out and running in the first place is admirable in itself!
— (correlates: IncomParable, SituationalStrategy, 2008-07-12 - Candy Cane Trail Run, ...)