Flew into SLC about 10:30 pm Friday and decided I was too tired to drive up to Logan and back down so I just drove up and slept a few hours at the start. That was fun..
It was so cold at the start that I could't believe everyone had showed up. Windy as heck with snow blowing everywhere. It looked like January. On the bus ride up the driver had a hard time once or twice keeping the bus on the road with the wind and kept telling us how nuts this was. At the top the roads were so slushy that there was no way I wanted to warm up, my shoes were already getting soaked. So I just tried to stay a bit warm until we could get running. The start seemed a bit slow and I settled in behind Ben and Teren running about a 5:25 pace. I felt pretty comfortable aiming for a 5:30 pace for the half and knew the first 5 miles were downhill. We ran the first 5K in 16:32 and hit the 10K at 33:12 so right on pace and it felt good. The wind wasn't so bad, just the usual up the canyon. When we came to about 7.5 miles the wind hit hard. Teren had by now worked up to a 200 yard lead and it took some work to reel him in. Ben and I started working together to cut the wind and ran the next 3-4 miles trading off lead. Each time I was in the lead it felt like I was partway bent over just to go forward with the wind and even though we were blocking for each other we lost about a minute a mile. Ben said so much for a PR day and I just laughed. Teren was long gone. At 10 miles or so I hit a water stop and just about lost Ben and had to work hard to catch back up. From then on I drafted more than helped! It felt pretty good from then on. Until Ken flew by us at 12.5 miles and I had to settle for fourth. Man he had a kick today! It was a really fun race, even though my time was way off what I've been training for. I couldn't stop grinning after. I was actually excited to feel so good after the race. I've been sore all week and felt this was way too much running lately so it was a relief to feel like the legs were fresh. I've had to run slow all week with training |