This is my first real race I've done in 2 years and I was kinda excited. I ran this race 2 years ago in 41:30 and I was a little disappointed. I've been running a lot more since May and I was excited to see how I'd do and set an ambitious goal of 35 minutes.
Course: It's a point to point 8k which starts in the North of the city and is a straight shot ending downtown. It's fairly flat but has some long false flats and slight uphills during the first 3 miles which can be draining. This year the race hit its cap of 12500 registrants making it the largest race ever held in Buffalo.
Pre-Race/Weather: It's chilly and about 40 out. The sky was gray and it fluctuated between drizzle and slight rain all day. I was hoping that the heavy rain would hold out and it did. We got up early and dropped the car off at the end so we wouldn't need the shuttle bus to get home and went to the start. I went to line up at the 7min/mile pace line and it was PACKED. If I could have one wish, it would not be world peace or money it would be that people would line up correctly at the starts of races. Where I was standing maybe 10% of the people could actually run 1 7 minutes mile let alone 5, I had a 6 year old next to me and some older ladies. It's beyond frustrating and I have NO idea why they do it.. Race: It's off and the first couple minutes I'm dodging people but it soon opens up and I can run. The crowd support and people are awesome and there are crazy customs including a daisy chain of 7 turkeys. Miles were 7:16, 7:26, 7:18, 7:20, with a finishing mile of 7:02. Finish was 688 of 11044 using the gun time and 720 with net time. Gun time was about 30 seconds slower. Got 84 of 670ish in my age group. I was moderately happy with my finish and was only off my goal by 90sec. It would have been a little too much to push down to 7min/miles especially with only running 12 miles a week. I gotta run more days a week and more start building up miles. I've scheduled a 5k in about a month, we'll see how I improve for that. Aiming for 21:30. I gotta do some faster paced runs to get used to running sub 7s.
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