I had only three weeks of training before race day, and before starting that, hadn’t run since the previous November. Not expecting much (except to finish), I began the race slowly, and over a couple miles gradually eased into a pace I thought I could maintain until the finish line. At last, I heard the satisfying high-pitched tone of my race bib microchip registering the finish line.
My time was 1:01:14; faster than I had ever run a 10K. A personal record (PR)! But, how could that be? Months of inactivity during the longest and coldest winter of my lifetime couldn't have been good for my fitness level. It seemed impossible to set a personal record after so little training, but how could chip timing be wrong? I turned this over and over in my head until I finally accepted the unusually fast time as the truth, and then proceeded to celebrate my own awesomeness.
A day later, I saw my race time had been adjusted to 1:03:47. That certainly seemed plausible to me. But, curiosity about how chip timing could have been erroneous prompted me to email the timing and scoring company to ask how my time could possibly have been off. This is the response I got:
"Most errors are human errors and the one that had your time off was my human error. For a short while I had the incorrect start time in for all runners. By mistake I took the time from when you crossed the 5K start line as your start time. Sure would be nice to have those couple extra minutes off your time, but.......... You know the drill."
Oh well. It was nice to pretend, even if it was only for a little while.