We decided to run in this race at the very last minute. It looked like this race was in the next town over from where my in-laws live. It's usually never very pretty for me to run the day after I've been in a plane or a car for a long time.
But hey, it was $14. Can't beat that!
I thought for sure, given that we had just run in a tough 5K race last week, that we were going to take this one easy. I've had some strange left ankle pinging when I'm not running and I really didn't feel like going all-out in a race in which previous race data made it seem like the locals could run pretty fast.
As expected, this race had a really fast start. I felt myself even trying to slow myself a little bit. But I guess I just tried to fall into a good rhythm the first mile. The second mile came and went and our split was something like 16:12.
I was a little surprised of that pace and then just felt like I wasn't really in the groove today. But then the third mile came and I wanted to keep ahead of a few people we had passed. I intentionally didn't look down at my watch until it was 3.54 miles.
The turn to the park where the finish was came soon enough and I willed myself to try to catch up to the couple of people ahead of me.
After I finished I turned around and saw the wife making her way up to the finish. I didn't see many female runners near her so I knew she had a great chance of placing.
So we waited for the awards -- and sure enough, she placed first for her age division! Then it turned out that one of the people I passed in the end had a time good enough for third place in my division!
I was pretty psyched then ... and happily picked up my 2nd place medal. The 4-mile run also gave me 100 miles for the month, which is something I haven't done since January.
Looking at the data, my best mile was the last one, with a 7:26/mile finish, which was decent but I had been able to log two of those in the 5K only a week before.
I guess it's one of those things, each race is different and your mileage may vary when it comes to race performance from week to week. This race was great -- I think we surprised the race director when we showed up from out of state for this race -- and I look forward to running in it next year!
Time: 8 a.m.
Temp: 70 degrees
Gear: Technical T-shirt, short (Asics neon blue), shorts, Nike Air Pegasus+ 29/A.
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