5k in 24:10. A little outside the 23:30-24:00 range I was hoping for. At 7:30-7:42-7:58 -(7:11 pace), it wasn't the best executed race pace-wise for me. Being just out of season, the race was stocked with high school XC studs who took off in a mad dash at the start. I obviously let them go, but still got sucked into a faster pace than I wanted. My first half mile was at sub 7 pace, which included a slight uphill. That had me in oxygen debt right off the bat, from which I was never fully able to recover. The legs felt ok, but I was sucking wind and hanging on for dear life most of the way.
I would've been totally happy with the time, but my solid interval workout from earlier this week lead me to believe that I could've run slightly faster. It may have been a somewhat misleading workout, because I have a pretty weak base at this point - with only 2-3 quality long runs over the past few months. Not having the 3 minute recoveries between miles this time around set me back a bit more, and I think that made going out too fast harder to recover from that it otherwise would've been. All easily fixable issues with some solid weeks of volume. The calves felt fine, which was a big plus.
I also accomplished the dubious feat of DFL'ing the 20-29 age group, despite being in the top 30% overall (29th/100). Tough whippersnapper crowd out there today! You think there'd be at least one 20-something hobby jogger out there slower than 24 minutes besides me, but nope!
Did a 1.5 mile warmup, then looped back after the finish to catch up with my wife Andrea and pace her in (she had a much better executed race than I did!), which amounted to about another half mile, so I'll call it 5 on the day.
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