Sept 29th - Oct. 5th

The week that I have been looking forward to since I finished my college career. I have been planning on racing the Twin Cities 10 mile since my pathetic performance last year and finally the week is here. I had a really good month of September after a not so good August which really helped. After that half marathon at the beginning of the month I have been on a mission to get my work done and run well at TC10. Another good week of training leading up to the race with a little workout midweek just to see how the legs were feeling. Everything went really well during the week so I was looking forward to the race. From the two 80 mile weeks I was going to cut back about 10 percent per week for the taper. I hit low 60s with a day off and then low 60s again this week to finish off the 'taper' period.

9/29 - 9.5 miles 1:08:00
Easy run with the UND team

9/30 - 8 miles 56:00
Easy run

10/1 - 9 miles 56:40
3 mile w/u
1 mile 5:08
.75 mile 3:56
.5 mile 2:39
.75 mile 3:50
3 mile c/d

This was my little 'workout' that I did in the middle of the week. It wasn't much but I didn't need that much either so I figured this would be a good indicator of how the legs were and what I was going to be able to do this weekend. I did it all on grass at University Park where I do most of my repeat workouts. I started the first mile and just rolled with it and tried to hit what I thought was going to be pretty close to 5:20. I didn't look at my watch until about 150 m to go and I was under 5:10 pace and felt fine so I just kept with it. 5:08 and feeling like I could have easily ran 20 seconds faster was fine by me. First 1200 went just as well though I tried to slow it down just so I wasn't working to hard but it didn't work. The 800 I managed to slow down enough to hit the 5:20 goal pace but was right back up on the last 1200. Overall it was a good effort and I at least knew that my legs had some speed and they would be able to carry me a little better than they did a month ago during the half.

10/2 9 miles 1:01:30
Another easy day with the last mile finishing 'harder' in a 5:40 which felt like a 6:10.

10/3 8 miles 1:03
Real easy with a friend in the morning. It was good to get up at 6 this morning just to feel what it is going to remotely feel like getting up at 3:45 on Sunday is like. I stopped by the track 1.5 miles from home and ran a couple of 400s to see if I had speed in the mornings. They were real easy and I went 75, 71. nice easy run home from there.

10/4 5.5 miles 39:00
Easy day with Paul the day before the race at the nature center by his house. The trails are really nice and man do I wish we had something like that in GF.

10/5 TC10 mile 55:09

Well this is the race that I have been anticipating since I graduated and it went really well. All I really wanted to do was to run faster than I did last year (57:13) and it was accomplished. I had the same goal as I did last year which was to be about 55:00 and it was a pretty good effort today. I went to bed around 9:30pm knowing that I was going to be getting up at 4am. I probably fell asleep around 10 and was up every 1.5-2hours from then until 3:30 at which point I just laid in bed and waited for the alarm to go off at 3:45. From then the day began.

I had a couple of pieces of toast with PB, two bananas, and a cup of tea to get the morning started. Some light stretching and relaxing before heading down to the capitol to get on the bus to the start. We arrived at about 5:40 and got on the 10 minute bus ride which took 25 minutes due to incompetent people driving the buses. Finally arriving at the dome to get ready for the race which was in about an hour. Bathroom and warmup took me until about 6:45 and after a little stretching and shoe changing I got to the line about 6:55. A couple of strides and the women took off with us following 8 minutes later. There was probably around 30 elite men that were running around at the start so I was able to get in the front of the starting line.

The race started and a group of abot 3 guys took off right from the start and were never seen again. There was another pack of about 4 guys and then another group of about 7 of us. I knew that the first two miles were all down hill and it was going to be easy to get out fast and not really notice it at all. So I just stayed relaxed and stayed at my goal pace of about 5:35 for the first 2 miles. The thrid mile had a hill on it that is almost a half mile long. The groups had split up after the second mile and I was in a group of 4 with the lead 3 and another 7 in front of us. I ran with the group of 3 for the first 4 mile and then decided to take the lead of the group after the 4th mile was a little slower than I wanted it to be. I thought that one of them was going to do something so I was just hanging with them for mile 5 and then decided after coming through 5 mile in 27:50 that I was gong to have to start puching the pace if I wanted to get under 55:00. So the next 2.5 miles was almost all up hill with a couple of very brief flat spots that were few and far between. So once I pushed up the hill at mile 5 I could see on of the guys in the pack ahead of us coming back so I had something to chase after. He was a good 30 seconds up on me so I knew that it was going to be a little bit before I caught him. I wanted to go hard up the summit miles but not too hard being that once I reached the top I still had almost 3 miles to go with some rolling hills along the way. I charged up the hills and passed the guy that I was chasing at about 7.5 miles and that was the last I seen of the men in the race. I picked off my first elite women around tis point as well so I knew that I was coming back on people and all of the people that I kept seeing I thought might be men but never were.

Once I peaked the top of Summit I was still feeling really good and decided that it was time to get down to business and that is what I did. The women ahead of me were just great motivation to keep going and try and catch as many as I could. It was great when I passed them cause it was like they were standing still and I was just flying. I probably passed about 6-9 women in the last 3 miles with 2 or 3 of them being in the last half mile. With a lot of the last 3 miles beingdown hill it was easy to start running to fast so far out but I knew that I was feeling good and went with the feeling. The last mile was great as I was rounding one of the last turns about a half mile out I could see people in front of me and just threw down over the last mile to finish in what I considered a pretty good time being that I had not raced since the half marathon and had no clue what I was going to be able to do. Here are he splits over the race from the garmin.

1 - 5:32
2 - 5:32 (11:05)
3 - 5:41 (16:42)
4- 5:29 (22:15)
5 - 5:34 (27:49)
6 - 5:42 (33:32)
7- 5:37 (39:09)
8 - 5:20 (44:30)
9 - 5:22 (49:53)
10 - 5:00 (54:53)
10.06 - 55:09
Last km - 3:01
Last 800 - 2:20
Last 400 - 1:07

Apparently I got some speed in me!!!!!! :D

So here is what I think about the race. I had to much left at the end of the race and probably should have run mile 4 and 5 harder like I was planning on doing but didn't. The first two miles could have also been run a little faster. I figured if I would have changed a couple of things I could have run about 54:30 but not much faster than that. It is hard to say what I could have done with other men around but being that the closest one in front of me was about a minute it was hard to do. I was thinking when I crossed the line that I could probably have held that 5:20 pace for a bit longer without that 5:00 in there, probably enough to carry me through a half marathon at least. I'm pretty sure that I could have run another 3 miles in 17 minutes to give me a 1:12 half. I was really happy with the last mile that I ran and figure that it will be a good indicator of how things are going to go for the rest of the fall races and for the indoor track season. Overall I was pretty pleased with the race.

Sept total miles 296
Week total 63
MTD 46

For now I have maybe one more race planned for the season which will be a road 5k for homecoming. I ran it last year in 15:53 or something like that but it was a little bit short. We shall see if situationa allow for races to take place or not but other than that maybe the another 5k/8k in the cities the weekend of halloween and possibly the Veterns aday run if I am in town that day. Probably run for the rest of the month and then take 3-4 days off in early November for deer hunting.