First race in 5 months. It was a beautiful overcast spring day for a run on river road. Additionally, it wasn't rainy and the wind was really minimal for this time of year. Based on the clocks I saw, my splits were: 4:50, 9:42, 14:38, 19:32, 24:26.
The race: a pack of 4 quickly dwindled to three, which made me happy because I wanted prize money (especially after dropping 64 stinking dollars on this race). The mile splits I saw built my confidence because they were pretty fast but I felt under control for the first couple of miles. Before mile 3, Danny Docherty and the other guy leading dropped me. Apparently at 5K I was 4 seconds behind them. But then Danny dropped the other guy, who wasn't really getting further ahead of me. My mental game is pretty bad, I was definitely consigning myself to 3rd place for a lot of the race. Probably the smartest thought I had was: "just keep running, and see how things shake out". Turns out, I eased past the other guy, and on the bridge coming back, someone said I had 15 meters on him. On the home straight, I heard him coming but did that thing where you find strength our of nowhere to sprint to the finish. I beat him by one second, and was 13 seconds off the winner. Based on my workouts, this was a pretty good day. It's a lifetime PR for a road race 10K. I'm also excited because I think the door is definitely open for a half marathon PR in a couple months. I'm assuming that I'm better at longer distances, and that I'll be in a bit better shape then. I'd be really happy if I could still run decent times (I consider 66 mid for a half marathon to be decent) after a year with no teammates, plus a surgery and a new addition to the family thrown in.
Update: finally mapped it out. Trying to be very conservative (taking turns as tight as possible), it still looks like a 6.32 mile race. Overall that means I may have run 29:58 for 10K. Sounds good to me!
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