Ran the Expedition Relay here in STG today with Bill, Mike, Dustin B, and Stephen. It's a 50 mile 5 member team event that loops around the city. We started out behind the DSC team in the very first leg and never caught them again. My first leg was the 4th leg of the race and ran from the Snow canyon entrance down SR19 into town. But not on the road. It was on the paved trail on the side of the road that's much harder to run. The road follows a more smooth grade on both the climbs and the drops. But the trail has some steep little climbs and very steep drops that make it hard to keep the momentum rolling. I started this leg and we were about 105 seconds behind the college boys. I took it out as hard as I dared and kept a pretty solid pace throughout. And by the end of the leg I had cut the gap down to 9 seconds and I averaged 5:18 pace for that 7.3 mile section. My last leg was the 10th and final leg of the race. We got in trouble in earlier legs and were at one point around 5 min's back from the boys. But Dustin B ran a solid 8th leg and cut off at least 2 mins maybe 2:30. Then Mike ran and I never heard his final split but it looked like he held his own and I'm guessing we were around 2:30-2:45 back from the kids when I took off. I knew that in a 5.7 mile leg I had the time to catch them and so I just dug in. Hit the first mile in 5:14 and it looked like I had almost cut the gap in half. By the Man o war bridge and 2.5 miles into it their lead was only 50 seconds. So now it's up the river trail and finishing around the same way as the STG half does behind the DC. By the time we got to the I-15 freeway bridge I was only 15 seconds back and thought that with about a mile still to go I'd get him for sure. But then my wheels feel off... Once we hit the wooden bridge next to the DC we were both on it at the same time and the gap was less than 10 seconds. But I couldn't close. Couldn't get anything else other than to maintain the now 8 second gap. As we raced up the trail to the turn our teammates from both teams were running along with us both. Yelling and screaming "GO, Your gonna do it, ect". It was kind of fun and kind like hell because my poor quads would take no more pounding and just before we turned off the trail to the side road I actually started to slow and let him go. But a couple seconds later once on the side road I caught a little gas and banged hard for 100 yards closing the gap to less than 5 seconds and we rounded the final corner and the finish line was right there. I just didn't have enough space to close anymore of a gap and so it goes... we lost. Kind of a fun day and race. The finish was super exciting and would have been great had I been able to muster the win. My 5:33 avg on that 5.7 mile leg wasn't enough to close the gap. But the DCS boys were on cloud nine and in the end it was fun to see them so pumped to beat a bunch of old guys.
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