Last week I paced Erin to her adult PR. This week, I was feeling good, was able to get in all my training mileage, and decided to give this race a solid effort.

It was a hot and somewhat windy day. My goal was 6:00 pace, which equates to an adult PR (18:49 last year). Having run the course pretty easily the week before, I knew it, and really liked that. I knew to line up pretty close to the front, where the miles were, where the hills were… It was cool. Unfortunately, my GPS watch wasn’t sitting in the cradle correctly and the battery was done… Poop! Regular old watch it was…

Line up, guy tells us “go,” and we’re on our way. Bit of a crowd for the small mats they had so the start was a bit rough, but it opened up pretty quickly. 6:00 for the first mile, which had a fair amount of wind. Great. Had a decent pack ahead of me including the first female… Targets… At about a mile and a half, I leave that little pack and then there’s only a few lone runners ahead of me. Close to the two mile, my friend Brian hops in and runs for a bit. I go through the 2nd mile at 12:07. Damn! Slowed. Still have a handful of targets in front of me… After the turnaround at maybe 2.5 miles, there is a slight hill. It was time to go. I gave it a bit more gas, pulled a small gap on all the targets, and held it. Final time was 18:56. Not bad, but also not as good as I was hoping for… It really took a lot of effort to make it happen. I finished 8th overall. What is odd is the person in front of me was 1:56 ahead. It was as if I won the race of normal people I didn’t even see the guy.

Caitlin and Erin also ran… They’re both somehow missing from the results, but Caitlin improved on her adult PR with a 20:30. We then capped off a good night of running with some Jaleo and Cold Stone.

There is another race this Friday, but I think I could use the rest… This was my first week really getting back to the miles, I was absolutely exhausted after our 15-miler today (combination of the heat, the hard week [hill workout, 40 miles, race Friday, harder than cross-training mountain biking yesterday]), and I’ve got a 42-mile bike ride in NYC next Sunday.

Next race is the Marine Corps Historic Half on May 17th. It will likely be crazy hot and I’m training through it; despite my 1:04 10-miler saying I can run a 1:25, I think I’m just going to go for accomplishing the sub-1:30 goal.