First race of the season! I am rather torn with this race and my performance in it. We left at 3:30 on Friday to head to Montana. This was a problem because it caused us to get to our hotel at about midnight and in bed by about 12:30 only to get up at 6:30 to prep for the race. I haven't been getting much sleep this week as it is. Race morning we headed over to the golf course where it was held. It was really cold! Our warm-ups were not helping too much. We started running and we got warmed up so that was nice. I will say I was pretty nervous for this race and I don't think I was too prepared mentally. We got to the start and the gun went off. We took off through the hilly start as a pretty large group. I stayed close to 2 of my teammates and then two of us peeled off at about 800 meters. We hit the first mile at 5:30... Okay David... Don't freak out... You can keep strong... However the problem was that just before the first mile I started to think about how I had 4 miles left... Bad idea. Going into mile 2 and 3 were okay but still mentally tough. Hit mile 2 at about 11:20 I believe. The golf course had a portion that did two loops. This mean that as you were finishing mile 3 you would run straight toward the finish line just to peel off and run another loop... Very tough mentally. At mile 3 my teammate (Ty) got a surge of energy and took off. Our split was a 17:30 so not bad. He caught up to Jef who was about 10-15 seconds ahead. I really should have stayed with him but I didn't feel like I was capable at that time. At about 3.5 miles I was completely by myself. That's when the race sucks... I could just hear by breathing and all I was doing was trying to maintain my pace. I still had Jef and Ty in my sights but I had already told myself I couldn't make it up to them (another bad decision). So I stayed back. Then finally I see the mile 4 marker and it gives me a bit of motivation. I began to remember our mile repeats from practice and knew that I could push it out for 1 more mile while holding that pace. I think I was at about the high 23s to 24s so I also knew that if I kept my pace I would make it under 30! I pushed through the last mile and the rolling hills right before the finish. I was pretty happy when I saw 29:30s and counting as I was approaching. I still think though that I could have done a lot better in this race. Jef came in about 30 seconds before me at 29:09 and Ty was right behind him. Oliver was our top guy with a 27:50 something I think. He got 49th and he is a freshman. Andrew wasn't too far behind him in the 28 range I believe. Felt good to finish... After the cool down I started to feel a bit sick. I got really really cold and my body felt like crap. I think I would attribute that to a lack of sleep... Maybe? I felt better as time went on but it wasn't an enjoyable feeling... Yeah that was that. Just shows you how fast some of these kids are! 87th out of 110 and i was holding about a 5:56 pace! Beast! The top guy had 25:05 which makes me a bit sick.
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