AM - Rode my bike up to work. Took almost as long as it take me to run! PM - 3 miles. Biked down to Sugarhouse, ran w/ Andrea, then biked home. I feel great... but I'm still taking it super easy this week.
I did a little breakdown of splits of UVM at work today that I think is interesting (which I also posted on my other blog, and that version includes a gross picture of my foot that I didn't want to subject everyone on here to look at!)... I took my mile splits and compared them to Paul's. We ran together for the first 6 miles, before he pulled away and chased down the leaders. He ended up finishing 2 minutes and 17 seconds ahead of me, and I wanted to see at what point during the race I lost that time to him.
After Paul put a small gap on me during the 7th mile, I actually made up some time on mile 8-9, which were primarily uphill and pretty difficult. At mile 10 Paul caught the leaders and obviously that spiced things up a bit up front, and they started flying. From 10-19 is where they really pulled away, except for miles 12 and 16, which had big hills. Over the last 10K, I actually ran fairly close to what Paul ran.
So, the positives I take from this are that I ran the uphills very well and closed strong for the last 10K. I'm much stronger on uphills than downhills... so that is something I need to work on... but I'm glad that its not the other way around. The middle part of the race will come with more training and experience. It would not have been wise to try and match Paul's acceleration after the 6th mile... I may have been able to hang for a while, but it absolutely would have come back to bite me later on. I'm happy that I was smart enough to let him go and focus on running my own race, and running negative splits.
If you saw allie's video of my finish, its clear that I had something left in the tank at the end. That is another good sign.
|