Pre-race meal

Ok, so here is something interesting. I'm racing tonight, 1500m, at the McGill track. So what do I eat? Well, unfortunately for journalistic enquiry, not much different from any other day. In fact, seeing as how I usually run within an hour or two of most of my meals (well, not quite, but every day and sometimes twice a day), you could plop a race in there and not have it make a bit of difference. That is as it should be, I think. This morning I had the two eggs, side-by-each with a pair of bagel slices, and of course the greens/protein/X combo. For lunch I had two salami and mustard sandwiches with spinach salad (tomatoes, cheese, red peppers). I've been drinking water all day, seemingly to no avail, but I guess it is better than nothing. Now, with an evening race, here is where it gets a little different. After a solid 90min nap, I woke up at 4pm, and mixed a banana-granola bar-raspberry yogurt-peanut butter-soy milk shake. That should be enough to hold me until race time. The 1500 is a pretty intense race, compared to what I'm used to, at least in terms of speed. I think mountain racing is kind of like 1500m pain for over an hour. Luckily, tonight's race will only be about 4min long. For those keeping score here is the start list:

Épreuve 10 Hommes 1500 Mètres Course Ouvert
===============================
Nom Année Équipe Seed
===============================
1 4017 De Bardi, Stephen 78 Montreal Olympiq 3:57.00
2 3780 Menard-Kilrane, Francois 82 Cirrus 4:00.15
3 4360 Soucy, Philippe 88 Dynamique de Lav 4:03.00
4 3835 Cloutier, Sylvain 85 Rouge et Or 4:05.00
5 4044 Rivard-Bernard, Simon 90 Montreal Olympiq 4:14.00
6 4033 Lofranco, John 77 Montreal Olympiq 4:15.00
7 3401 Cardle, Peter 70 Montreal Olympiq 4:15.00
8 4723 Pelletier, Mathieu 85 Vaudreuil-Dorion 4:25.00
9 4713 Nepveu-Goulet, Julien 88 Montreal Olympiq 4:25.00
10 4710 Belgherdi, Mustapha 59 Vainqueur 4:34.00
11 4780 El Moustir, Younes 92 Montreal Olympiq 4:55.00
12 3418 Lariviere, Roger 52 Vainqueur 5:00.00

I like to see how close I can come to my seedtime. I find it annoying when people give a seed time that is obviously not within their range of ability. In this case, it doesn't matter too much, as there will only be one heat (or maybe two, of 7 and 5, but I doubt it), but when there are several heats and to go in the faster heat means a shot at a faster time (and maybe qualification for something) lying about seed times can make a difference. I like to play the game of who ran closest to their seed time. Extra points for running faster than your seed time.

I hope that is the case for me. My best is 4:09.1, run indoors at McGill in January of 1999. It has been a while. We will see. I hope the strength from mountain running, and the turnover intervals I did earlier this week, and the rest I've had over the last couple of days will lead to good things. We'll see.

Oh, and of course, the food. As I said, with race time at 19h20, it's tough to eat dinner before hand. It's fine for me to eat and then go for an easy run, but eating too close to an intense effort like a 1500m could lead to disastrous circumstances. So I'll go with Eload and X at around 5:30. At 6pm, Cardle (seeded at 4:15, though he's probably closer to 4:05) will arrive and we'll walk over to the track. A quick check-in, an easy jog, some stretching, some drills, strides, and then the gun goes off.

Cardle and I, as you can tell from the ages of the competitors, are relatively old men. Debardi is old, too, but he's in great shape. Menard is not considered to be old just yet. Phillip Soucy and Simon Rivard-Bernard are the two high school kids we are keying off. Cardle trains with Soucy, and Simon trains with Debardi and is in my club. Kids tend to go out too hard and die, so even if they are fitter than we are, there is still a good chance that we could eat them up (see I'm keeping on message) in the final few hundred meters.

I'll leave it at that for now. I will post the results later.