RandomFailure

I was wondering how I’d be able to do in this race, since I had just raced the day before, and I hadn’t done races on two days in a row in 4 or 5 years. Again, it was another cold and brisk morning. This start would be more difficult because we started on the bridge, which meant that the car was nowhere near the start line. I warmed up early, ditched the sweats, and tried to stay warm until the start. Saw Seebo, Kevin F., Kevin J., and Goat before the start. Nice to see that almost all of the other runners were well behind where the start would be, since in these types of races (even though I’m not all the fast) there are a lot of people who just want to tstart in the front. Most likely just for the photo op. But it creates a real hazard and hassle for those of us who are actually trying to race, since we have to dart and dodge around all these fools.

Before we lined up, Goat and I discussed pacing – we were going to try to start around 7:00 per mile on the bridge and see what happened from there. I lost Goat during the lineup and started out by myself; he caught up about 1/4 mile in. We hit Mile 1 in 6:55 (going uphill). “Nice pacing,” said Goat. “Not really,” I replied, “just lucky.” On the downhill to Philly, a lot of people passed us. “Don’t worry,” I said, “we’ll catch them back on the uphill.” Sure enough, once we hit the turnaround, we started passing people again – hit Mile 2 in 6:59.

Mile 3, which was mostly downhill, went by in 6:28. Goat said, “You can go.” “No, I’m good.” And then about 10 seconds later, I realized I was pulling away without picking up the pace. The interesting thing was that ther were no real groups in front of me, just a long singular line of runners with some decent spacing between each. So I decided I would try to use them one by one to ladder my way up the field. Surprisingly, this started working. I would catch up to the person in front of me and as I went by, hoping that they’d hang on. But nobody did. Mile 4 in 6:28. This ad-hoc strategy seemed to be working, so I just kept running my own race, not worrying about whether anybody stayed with me or not. Mile 5 in 6:33. Saw the guys cheering well before the finish line, and put in the last kick to finish in 41:20.

Not a 10K PR for me, but I bettered last year’s time for this race by 44 seconds. I am very happy about this. A good running weekend.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 at 8:03 AM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.