my makeup may be flaking

Leg #1 It begins

The saga beings with me wondering around Salt Lake City looking for Wild Oats market, which is where I was supposed to meet up with Chad.  I eventually realized that Wild Oats had become Whole Foods, which was why I couldn't find it.  Fortunately I saw Adam. After that I had a long wait, during which time I got to talk to Chad, Kory, Cody,Bill,Mitch Zundell, Steve Cuttitta, Andy Mclellan and Steve Olsen. 

After a couple of hours, Andy and I agreed that we were tired of waiting (we were runners 11 and 12). The first van was really long, almost 4 hours, so waiting at the first exchange was the most downtime we had all night. I had seen the times that I was supposed to hit and I was getting a little psyched out. I'm a terrible altitude runner, and a below average climber, however Sasha was making predictions based on Boston, which exposes neither of those weaknesses. Then we were finally going and things seemed to go by very fast. The first four runners in our van were either right on or a little ahead of their projected time and we had opened up a huge lead on the Runner's Corner team.

I felt pretty loose at the start of my run which was nice and I just tried to relax and find a pace that I could maintain all night. I had about a 900 foot climb right of the bat which I just tried to cruise up. I didn't have a Garmin, but I could guess how much further I had to go by looking at how the above me the ridge was.  About halfway up my quads started to burn and I was a little worried that I had screwed myself for the rest of the night. I crested the hill and passed the 1 mile to go marker at just over 21 minutes (over 7minute pace!). I knew that I had to fly on the downhill mile (300+ feet down in the last mile) to stay on pace. My legs responded wonderfully and I was sprinting all the way down getting as much air as possible into my lungs. I doubt the mile to go mark was accurate, but if it was I ran about 4:35 for my last mile, when I needed about a 5:06. It probably wasn't.