So, Chad recruited Sasha and I to run a 5k for his law firm. I guess they have an annual trophy that they give out to the fastest team composed of 3 men and 2 women. The times of all five members of the team are added together and the fastest team wins. The course goes around and through the U of U campus and basically goes up for the better part of the first half of the race, followed by a flat portion in the middle and then dropping significantly the last portion of the race. Due to the team nature of the race and the early climb, we decided to hold back the first mile or so, trading 1 minute intervals. This was Sasha's idea to prevent me from going out too fast so that I might take a shot at beating BJ Christensen, who was running on another team, with a fast closing second half of the race. So, the race starts and Sasha takes the first lead. Our second runner didn't take his interval at 1 minute so I pulled even with Sasha and I started to run with him. After about 2 minutes I started to pull up in order to catch some of the runners on the opposing team. I passed all of them and then passed the third member of our team shortly before the mile mark. Coming up to the mile, Sasha put in a surge to pull even with me and pulled me through the last 50m of the mile to go through it in 5:26. At this point I decided to put in a little more of a surge up the hill in order to try to gain a little ground on BJ and slowly close the gap. I did this and I felt like I made marginal gains in closing the gap on him until we hit the top of the hill about 1.4 into the race. At this point the road flattened out and stayed flat until about 1.8 or so when it started to drop. I hit the 2 mile mark in 10:58 (5:32) and I could tell that BJ was now stretching his lead over me just a little at a time. I started making efforts to make up ground on him, and although I did not feel too tired I felt like I was missing that extra gear to speed up much faster. It went like this until the finish as I would try different tactics to try and make up some ground on him but he kept extending his lead just a little at a time. I went through the finish in 16:26.8 (5:28 for the last 1.1) whereas BJ finished 19.4 seconds in front of me in 16:07.4
So, I didn't win the race individually, but we did win as a team. Although BJ beat me by 19 seconds, Josh (our second place finisher for our team) and Sasha both beat the number 2 and 3 runners on BJ's team giving us an 18-19 second lead before the women's times were added. Our women sealed the deal by finishing a couple minutes in front of the women for the other team. On a side note, Chad also beat the number three runner for the other team, so we really had 4 runners in front of the other teams number 3. So, overall I think it was a good race. The course is slow because of the climbing, and Chad measured it to be long on his GPS so we think that it really might be closer to 3.15 which makes my time more respectable. I also didn't feel too fatigued at the end of the race so that is a positive for me because it means that my overall level of fitness should carry over well into longer races. After the race we ran to liberty park and did a 3 mile tempo at Chad's marathon pace in 17:28 before running back to where we started to finish up our mileage for the day.
| 