I woke up at 6am to eat some breakfast and head to town to do an early packet pick up and some warm up miles. I was really close to hitting 100 miles for the month of July so that helped me get there to do a couple of extra. I picked up my bib and headed out. It was so thick and muggy, and my head was completely full of mucus. Did that paint a vivid enough picture for you? Uff.
The warm up was a complete slog and I ended up only going 1.5 miles and being completely drenched. I did manage to get some monster snot rockets blown out during the warm up so I could breathe a little bit.
We all lined up for the race announcements and I was excited to see some of my runner friends. I found a couple of pals I thought I could try to stay with and/or keep in my sights based on our recent 5k race series times.
We started out and I glanced down at my watch a couple minutes in to it to make sure I hadn't gone out too fast (as I tend to do, 7's? um... no thanks, not right now!) and was shocked that my labored pace was an 8:40. Uh... according to Mr. McMillan Running Calculator that should be pretty doable based on my 5k paces. Shoooooot.
Mile 1 8:53
From there I decided just to run comfortably hard, and maybe my legs would loosen up and have some speed in them the second half of the race! (Spoiler alert: they did not have any speed or additional pep in the second half). I tried to just stay competitive in that I worked to catch people that were loosing steam in front of me.
Mile 2 9:15
At the turn around I glanced at my watch and saw 18:20, so my new goal was to finish around 36:40, as I knew I was fading and thought that might help me hunker down a bit. I leap frogged with a couple of gals during this stretch before one finally left me in her dust.
Mile 3 9:09
I tried to reel in a male and female that were in my sights during the final mile and tried to kick with .7 to go in the race. My mile split will tell you how slowly I must've been going for that first .3 miles. My legs just felt like lead.
Looking at my running form in the race pictures, I can totally tell why it felt like garbage. For some reason I've reverted back to my bad non-glute using running form. I like to refer to his as my sad panda form. Uff, my hamstrings ache just looking at it.
I finished the last .25 pretty strong, and even had a 7:20 something final kick.
Mile 4 9:08
.05 :21
My final time was 36:48 for a pace of 9:06. A PR. (auto PR, but whatevs)
Great start to a race series even if it was a last than fun race performance! That's a heckuva lot faster than I would've run on my own on Sunday in the humidity with a head cold!
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