I've been plagued by peroneal tendonitis again (ankle), just like a year ago, but not quite as severe. It doesn't bother me much on the smooth, mostly-flat surfaces, but kills me on the trails. So I took three days off completely to see if it would help. It did a little, but still, as I was standing at the start, trying to keep warm, the ankle was in some good pain. Oh well.
The Provo City marathon runs mostly on roads in South Provo and out toward Utah Lake. It is mostly flat and also runs about four miles on the Provo River paved trail. I didn't enjoy this half marathon as much as last week's Thanksgiving Point marathon because this one has way too many cars going by, very bothersome.
A great feature of this race was the weather. A squall of rain hovered over us and just stayed there. Twice hail fell from the sky. I enjoyed it, because I usually do better in poor weather compared to the competition. It just doesn't bother me much because of all my early cold weather training. But I did finish before the real downpour started.
I treated this race like a long training tempo run. I wasn't very serious about it, but still did pretty well. After two miles, I pretty much settled down into my place, not being passed by other runners but only catch a couple. I got a little lazy going up the Provo River trail. But wow, during the last two miles, incredible energy kicked in and I was able to pass a couple runners and finish very strong. That is a nice sign for the Ogden Marathon in a couple weeks. It felt like I could continue sub-7 miles at that point for quite a few miles if the race was longer.
My mile splits were: 6:27, 7:01, 6:58, 7:01, 7:09, 7:13, 7:12, 6:56, 7:50, 7:44, 7:37, 7:31, 6:40, and 1:07. I finished in 1:34:26. That was 27 seconds faster than last week.
I got second place in my age group, surprised that someone beat me because I never saw him. But he beat me by five minutes, probably among the fastest in the state in my age group. I've been getting accustomed to winning my age group in these short races.
I was 31st out of 669 starters. 4th place masters (age 40+) (74 starters).
This was a nice tune-up for Ogden. That is three times this month that I've run a half marathon in 1:34. If I do that in Ogden, that will beat my split from last year by 4 minutes. That would be sweet.
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