Provo River Trail Half Marathon. Finished 3rd overall behind Sasha and Ronald Greenwood. My time was 1:15:29, which improved my PR for this distance by a couple of minutes. The course has a lot of downhill, so I do take the result with a grain of salt. But I will take it! The race started surprisingly slow with no one wanting to get out front. So I did that for the first quarte mile; well, until Sasha came blazing by (he had begun at the back of the back so he could start the timing equipment) and that was more or less the last time I saw him. Sasha was followed by a young guy in what looked like gym clothes or basketball clothes. Then Ronald Greenwood and I traded places through a couple of miles, trading third. We came upon a group of runners that were jogging up the hill and they joined Ronald. Ronald picked up the pace with them and they were off. These guys, I think there were 4 or 5 of them, all continued to run bandit through the end of the race, I believe. I passed the gym shorts guy (who was very nice when I talked with him after the race) at the turnaround after running back up the canyon after Bridal Veil falls. I then started to run down the bandits, but the Sasha and Ronald were long gone. I kept my pace steady through the bottom of the canyon, and heading toward Riverwoods. Mile 12 is a labrynth of parking lots and office complexes that confused me a lot (I almost ran through the drive up teller at bank), but I did manage to follow the orange cones in the end. I tracked down the last bandit at 12.5 and tried to hold through the finish. I went down to this race with Casey and Straley, who also had very strong races. Mark Holland finished 8th as well. I need to check on the final results, but Ingunn had a great race too. | 