my makeup may be flaking

AM 8

 PM 2 mile warmup then 4 loops of liberty park (5.4 miles) at about half marathon pace. Then 2 miles cooldown.

My laps were 7:30,7:42,7:39,7:34. Total time was 30:25 (5:37 pace) I was slowed down quite a bit trying to dodge many, many people walking (this is hard to do at 5:35 pace). Primary motivation for this run was to put some more miles in my type as to see how they feel. I've had some cramping problems in my races the past month and I wanted to see if it was the shoes. I felt great the whole time and could have easily gone a couple more laps, so its not the shoes.

AM 9.5

PM 8.5

AM 9.5 One loop of Sugarhouse

PM 4.5 Short run around campus.

AM 5.5

PM 10 To sugarhouse, I did two loops of the park and back to the department. Second half of the run was very fast.

As I still have no car, I took the train.

Poor planning this morning. I ran left my house running at about 6:20am without eating anything. I was quite hungry when I got to the train station and quickly bought something from a vending machine. I sat on the train eating and drinking gatorade and realized I'd left my number at home!

Anyway, I was nauseous from eating to soon before the race, but, as usual, told myself to try my best and also not to puke in front of little children or hot women.

It looked like I might be have no competition until Jamal Tongo showed up right before the start. Nate H. was with him but didn't run. I feel like Jamal is following me around. I've done 6 races this year in Utah and he's been in 4 of them!

At the start there were the usual sprinters but I took the lead after about 200m. About a minute later, Jamal came up on my shoulder and we started to pull away from everyone else. We hit the mile together in 5:13 and I stayed with him a bit longer, but then he chose to really pick it up on a little steep section.

The second and third miles are really big hills and I ran 5:33 and 6:00. Then we started to head back down and I ran a 5:11. Jamal ran 5:24,5:51,5:05 for this section so he was pulling away at a pretty steady rate.

Mile 5 was 5:12 and at this point I couldn't see Jamal because we were running through the 5K runners. He had the benefit of a lead bike to clear his path (he told me this had helped him afterwards) but I was ducking and weaving quite a bit. I felt pretty strong at this point, just quite sick. I did the last 1.2 in 6:23, which is about 5:13 pace. This is pretty impressive because this was a flat mile and had a lot of twists and turns, in addition to the human obstacles.

Anyway, I ended up 1:10 behind Jamal, which is about how much he beat me by at minuteman, except that was a 10K. This was certainly my best 10K ever as it adjusts (using course tool plus altitude) to a 31:42 flat sea level time. My previous best was 32:30. As a point of comparison, I ran 32:53 at Des News which translates to a 33:14 flat race at sea level.

Not only was this my best 10K, it is also my best non marathon/half marathon race ever and also my best non-tapered race ever (both by significant margins). I had been worried that my 5k and 10k were holding back my improvement, so I've been focusing my training in that direction with pretty good results.

After the race, I ran the 5k course, picked up my award and then ran to the farmington train station as an extended cooldown.