BOCA Hawaii 30K: the marathon dress rehearsal

The 30K is about 18.6 miles, seven weeks before the marathon, and of the five races in the readiness series it's the one that matters most and the one that's easiest to get wrong. I understand exactly why people get it wrong, because I wanted to get it wrong myself. A 30K is long enough to feel like an accomplishment and short enough to race, and if you run it at real effort it turns into a marathon in disguise, with a marathon's worth of recovery attached, and there wasn't a marathon's worth of recovery available because there was a marathon in seven weeks. I did that math more than once, since the number on the card is right there tempting you.

So we ran it at marathon effort. The rule for the series is that from the 25K on, every race is a rehearsal, and the 30K is the one in full costume, which meant I was checking things rather than chasing anything. Breakfast was the one I'd eat in December, the shoes were the pair that would get the marathon bib, and the fueling was whatever was in my pockets and whether it stayed down after mile twelve in the heat. The pace was the real question, whether the first ten miles could be boring on purpose and what the last five felt like once they had been. Boring on purpose is my specialty (I've been practicing it my whole life).

That's what a 30K is for, and a time isn't, so mine is here because it's on the card and not because it means anything: 3:27:55, 11:09 a mile, fifteenth in my age group. Jay ran 2:42:08 and was eighth in his.

If I took one thing from the whole readiness series, it was this race. I could have raced the 30K and had a great October and a bad December, or I could rehearse it and let December be a longer version of a day I'd already done. I'd decided the people who look strong at mile 22 of the Honolulu Marathon are the ones who were bored at mile 5 of this one, and I wanted to be one of them, so I ran it bored and waited seven weeks to find out whether that was right.