Ran the Nomura Katabiragawa 10K. According to the weather forecast it was supposed to be a cloudy cold and windy day, but the weather couldn't have been more perfect. It was sunny and warm. I got to the race and did a good warm up. At the start line, the front row was for the invited guest runners, and then somehow I was able to line up right behind them on the second row, so my starting position was good. My race plan was to go out hard the first 5K and try to get a good time at the 5K, and then to somehow hang on during the hilly last half of the course. At the start of the race I stayed with the guest female runners. I was surprised how easy it was to keep up with them, and then I thought, maybe they were running a different race strategy than me. I was running the first half hard, but maybe they were running the first half easy and then going to push it in the last half. I stayed with them until about the 5K mark, then as soon as we hit the hills, they started getting away from me. I do a lot of hill training, but these hills were tough. My lack of strength showed. I got to the long downhill section at about 7K. It felt so nice to kind of just coast down the hill. That little bit of rest was what I needed. It wasn't as bad coming back up the hill as I had imagined. Once reaching the top of the hill it was level running the rest of the way to the finish. I ended up 3rd place among the women, and 25th place overall. I was hoping to run about 36 minutes, but I ended up 37:05. I ended up being more than a minute behind the two guest runners. finished off with a short cool down. On the podium after the race, I noticed of the men runners, all of the runners were wearing the Nike Vaporfly shoes. Of the women however, 1st place was wearing New Balance, 2nd was wearing the Vaporfly and I was wearing New Balance. | 