Ethan Cannon

It was dumping rain all day. Thankfully nothing during my race. You felt the wind, but mostly just when you weren't running behind someone. Before the race, my coach told me to not worry about splits but just compete. I think that was good and makes me feel better about how I did. So, the race started and the pacer had just told us he was going to hit 66s (13:45 pace). This was reasonable given that that pace was just a hair faster than several of the guys in the field have run. Several laps in, I was hanging with the group (starting in dead last, but worked my way up a couple spots) and not struggling too bad. I didn't know how to feel cuz I was still right there with everyone, but some guy yelling splits to someone said we were hitting 67-69 pace. Sure enough, my second lap was 69.7! So, pacing was bad for the leaders but wasn't bad for me. When people started dropping, I surged to catch up. My fastest lap was 1800-2200 in 66.0 (closed in 66 mid). Hit 2 miles in 9:03 feeling tired but alright, but apparently I slowed down a lot, hitting 70-71 after that. I soon recognized it wasn't going to be a fast race, but I kept battling. Don't have regrets about my effort even though it was not my best. A lot of people didn't run fast actually (for example, basically everyone in my heat was sub 14 or sub 8 and I beat like 6 of them), so maybe the humidity (80%) affected us. Going into this race I thought I was in 14:05-14:10 shape under good conditions.