9:00am
When I got dressed this morning Kym was like "What is that? Are you really going to wear that?" I said "Heck yes! I'm gonna wear this! And I'm gonna win!" Preston and Carl both thought I was over dressed too and made plenty of flamer jokes, but hey, I can take it and I finished ahead of them both :)
I started up front and went out too fast as usual and I thought I saw Thaine up in front of me, but I wasn't sure if it was him. I didn't talk to him before the race and I couldn't remember exactly what he looked like. I was trying my best to slow the pace down to about 7:00 for the first couple miles and eventually lost site of him since he was holding 6:50's. About a half mile before I got to the 10k turn around a different guy passed me on his way back and said "see you at the finish dude". Then I thought oh crud that must have been Thaine and he's about a mile in front of me now. Disappointed, I just kept it steady even though I was going slower than my goal pace. I figured I might still have something left in the tank later for a strong finish even if I couldn't beat him. After mile 9 I decided it was time to pick it up and at least try to beat my PR from last year since I definitely wasn't going to beat my 15k pace and probably wouldn't even beat Thaine unless he got lost or something. Now I'm doing sub 7's and picking off runners one by one and near the end of mile 12 I see the first guy I thought was Thaine and powered past him and another guy maybe 30 yards ahead of him. After that it was hard to keep motivated with no one in front of me, the 12th place finisher was probably already done by now. It turned out that the guy in mile 12 was the real Thaine so it was kind of fitting that his fate was the same as mine in the last race :) He ran strong the whole way and let me pass him at the end to win by less than a minute. Afterwards we shook hands, exchanged phone numbers and we'll probably do some training runs together since we live only a few miles apart. Thaine is a very cool guy and very fast! I'm sure he will keep me at the top of my game.
Distance Split pace
1.00 6:51
2.00 6:50
3.00 7:10
4.00 6:48
5.00 7:15
6.00 7:15
7.00 7:05
8.00 7:11
9.00 7:11
10.00 6:53
11.00 6:43
12.00 6:48
12.43 6:29
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