Everything Counts

STRIDER'S WRC HALF MARATHON

Well I went back and forth yesterday on whether I should race or not.  My knee has been pretty sore all week and I had missed the last few days of training.  My wife, Amy, advised against running as did Bam via my comment section yesterday (Steve on the same comment section said to go for it) and I told Amy that was the correct and sound advice.  It's the advice I'd give someone if they asked me, but for some reason I couldn't take the smart and conservative advice.  I guess I learned to race through injuries in college and it's stuck with me (I ran a whole cross country season with a stress fracture once).  So, I took the risk and ran this morning.  It wasn't my best effort, but it was still pretty solid and the knee held up pretty good.  The quad did tighten up a bit above the knee in the second half, but nothing I couldn't run through.

I met up with Brett Hales and Bryant at Rainbow Gardens and we carpooled up to the race from there.  We met up with Ken and Steve and got on the buses and were on our way.  Once to the top the lines for the port-a-potties were long so we ran up to the campground 3/4 miles up the road and use the facilities there.  Knee didn't hurt at all on the warm-up...good news.

The gun went off and Bryant, Jace, Brett and I formed the lead pack with Ken and Steve forming their own little chase pack.  By the mile I had gapped the others just slightly and kept a small gap through mile 5 of so, though it was only about 10 seconds or so.  My 5k split was 15:48.  Around mile 5 I heard footsteps and looked down at my watch, I was running about 5:03 pace, so whoever was coming was running sub-5.  By mile 6 Bryant caught up to me and we ran together until 8.5 or so before he started to pull away.  My 10k split was 31:36 (so another 15:48 5k).

My legs felt really heavy and fatigued.  It's always weird when your breathing is fine, but your legs just won't cooperate.  I was battling the best I could but I kept bleeding time.  Around 11.5 I heard footsteps again and knew Hales was gaining on me.  Brett passed me at like 12.4 but I didn't let him get more than 5 meters on me and with .25 to go I kicked hard.  He didn't really want any part of kicking and just kind of let me go.  So, Bryant was first with a 1:07:38 give or take 3 seconds, I was second with a 1:07:53, Brett 3rd in 1:08:02, Jace 4th in 1:08:15, Ken 5th in 1:11 and Steve 6th in 1:13 (old Weber teammates taking the top 6 spots).

My knee is a little sore but actually not as bad as I thought it would be (we'll see how tomorow feels).  This was over two minutes faster than I ran last year when I won this race, so great improvement.  Here are my times and splits from the last three years running this race:

Mile	2011	2012	2013
1	511	514	503
2	512	518	507
3	514	518	507
4	520	512	503
5	525	521	507
6	530	523	505
7	525	520	506
8	539	516	507
9	549	529	519
10	547	526	516
11	559	535	528
12	552	534	526
13	543	525	516
13.1	35	33	27
Final	1:12:39	1:10:24	1:07:53

1:05:xx next year???