my makeup may be flaking

Did two races today. First went to Magnuson Park (on the Western Shore of Lake Washington) to run the Winter Grand Prix series #3. It's a similar idea to the SLCTC series except as the races are 2miles or 3k, you can expect alot of high school and college kids.

I was initially planning to do the road race on the 20th but I scrapped that idea because the roads were too treacherous. This led to me trying to run an XC race (a 3k no less) in flats. The course was mostly fine but there were some tough areas for me where I lost a lot of ground and I couldn't make it up. I split 5:08 at the miles and I think the two big loops that we did were in exactly the same time. Brett Winegar won, a teammate of Sean Sundwall at Club Northwest. He looked very controlled and I think he would have gotten the better of me even if I had had spikes. I also recognized Bruce Jackson, who beat me. I did beat James Conrick though, who won the Conference I ran in my first year of HS xc. He was about 3 minutes ahead of me then (that was 8 years ago, wow!). Anyway definitely a good sign, and I'm confident that I can break 9:30 in my upcoming two mile.

I went home and regrouped, took a shower, had some lunch then headed off to Kirkland's Bridal Trails State Park. This was the sight of the Seattle trail running festival (the name was something like that). There was a 5mile a 10mile and a 50k. The 10mile seemed to attract some good competition year in and year out so I jumped into that. There seemed to be a good knot of 5 or 6 good runners. However, a hilly muddy 10 mile race plays into my hands. I surged away on the first uphill and no one made a move to catch me. Instead they all ran a more tactical race for second (so I was informed by the 3rd placer, Leif Kohler). I'm sure those guys were not happy to be racing the Seattle Half runner up! I blitzed through the first half (5.2 miles I believe) in 29:30 or so. This was only a couple seconds off of the record for the "5miler". It was raining hard and I was basically fighting not to lose my shoes in the muddy trails. I lost some time in the middle of the second lap. I had a ton of energy left at the end to close hard, but there just wasn't enough dry trail and I ended up running 1:00:24 to miss the 10mile course record by 1 second! Or so I was informed. The course record was from 2006 by Andy Edick who had placed 3rd in State that year.