Overall, the race went much better than I had expected. Last year I won this race in a 1:15. However, this week I was struggling with a cold from my wife and a little digestive track problem from my daughter. I woke up with my nose completely stuffed and coughing. I almost decided not to run. I'm glad I mad the effort up the canyon though because coming down was great!
I drove up with a friend from work that I've run with a few times. He's a good guy and runs very consistently. He was shooting for a 1:35 (hit 1:31 today). After we got to the start the first person I saw was Sasha, I also knew that Mike Kirk and a few other guys faster than me were there so thoughts of defending my title were quickly smacked down. As always it was nice to meet some of these guys to put a face to a name on the blog. Also, at this time the decongestant was kicking in and I was breathing normally and thought I would give it my best effort anyway. From the start, there were maybe six guys ahead of me for the first mile. One of them was Brad Phippen, whom I had a good race with at the Des 10K. However, he was up with Sasha and they were cruising. So I just settling in were I was and started the climb. My first two miles were 6:36 and 6:59 during which I passed two of the guys. I didn't like that 6:59 and started a sustained push. I passed Neal Gassman and he quickly passed me back 6:26 for mile three. Then mile 4, the final climb, I passed Neal again but after we passed the crest he passed me back and literally disappeared before my eyes. Man can he fly. Also just before the crest I saw Brad hand off to Darryl so any hope of running with Brad quickly dwindled as well. The rest of the race I was completely on my own. Somewhere within mile 10 or so, I saw Chad and as I passed him, he shouted some words of encouragement that I really needed at that time. My splits also help to motivate me on this race. It is so nice to see such low numbers with relatively little effort. I look at the last nine of this race more like a controlled fall than a run. My splits down were 5:17, 5:10 (fastest), 5:34, 5:27, 5:39 (slowest), 5:21, 5:26, 5:19, and 5:24. As Sasha pointed out in his blog this race is closer to a 13 miler than a half marathon. So I finished in 4th overall in the exact same time that I ran the Provo Half Marathon in, pretty amazing for a number junky like I am. I'm sure that if I was not sick I could have finally broken 1:15 but the important race this year is TOU. I'll worry about a half PR next year. | 