This week I'm going to start with Saturday first, since it was the first race I've done since I seriously started training, and its probably the most interesting part of the post anyways.
Saturday was a crappy day here, it stormed, more or less, all day Friday and Saturday. The race was set to go off at 8am, but due to the rain we all stood around ready to go for 45 minutes and they finally let us start just before 8:30am.
As always I try to stay closer to the middle of the pack at the start, I'm not the fasts but seriously walkers should start at the end, drives me crazy. So I went off about 1:20 seconds behind the clock time. Also, my shoes, New Balance Minimus Trail 1010v2, held no water, yes my feet were wet but the shoes didn't retain any water, it was awesome.
Mile - 1 - This was the easiest mile, it was more downhill than up and I was feeling great. I was passing people left and right, not sure why you would avoid a water puddle when you were standing in the pouring down rain, but I had open lanes everywhere. My trail running shoes made switching between mud, water, gravel, and concrete effortless and I never missed a step. I was doing great until I got to the split and the lady called out "8 minutes 47 seconds". That hit me like a brick, if you factor in how far behind the clock I was that's a 8:27 mile, almost 4 minutes faster than any time I'd done in training for more than a decade. I knew before I got there I spent my load to fast but I didn't realize I was moving that fast.
Mile 2 - Start with some hills I flew up and about 1/3 of the way through the mile the water station came up. I walked through that to get some energy back in my legs, take off my rain jacket, and drink a cup of water. Then back into the zoo for some more ups and downs, they aren't massive hills but they are steep enough. Mile 2 was my slowest by far, the split was 22:05 as I ran past, but I was feeling ok, tired but not spent.
Now I have to take a break here to tell you about a realization I had. Mile 2 wound around the lions, monkeys, etc. The lion and lioness were standing up watching us all run past and I locked eyes with the great beast. In that instant I wondered what he was thinking and here's how it played out in my mind. The lion sees all these snacks running past, sure he just ate but its more about the hunt than the snack. Time to leap this small ass chasm and snag a couple for later. I had to break off eye contact because the exhibit was over and I kind of chuckled to myself, then he let out a roar and I thought I was going to piss myself.
Mile 3 - Fairly uneventful after the lion. I was hurting so I did my walk\run combo as I felt I could. I saved up a little energy so I could run hard from about the time I saw the 3 mile marker until the finish, the last mile and little bit was right around 12min which is around what I was training at.
I honestly thought the hills would sap my strength more so than they did. My target time was 39 minutes and my chip time was 34:08, almost 5 full minutes faster. I finished 544 out of 1250 overall and 29 out of 58 in my age group.
The rest of the week was fairly normal, I backed off a little bit to save some energy for the race Saturday.
Monday - Core Attack (20 min video) + 30 min Yoga + light weights
Tuesday - 2 miles with half a mile hill intervals
Wednesday - 30 min Les Mills Combat Kick Start
Thursday - 2 miles with speed intervals (8x 60s run 90s rest)
Friday - Smoked 20#s of pork shoulder, 13 hour cook.
Saturday - Race
Sunday - Put salt in moms pool, stirring a pool is a lot harder than it sounds.
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