Today was the annual Lake Havasu City High School Cross Country Fundraiser 5 K. It's always on one of the golf courses here and is a fun but difficult 5 K. They changed the course up a bit this year so it ran a bit long at 3.2 instead of 3.1 but I liked the change.
It was a beautiful morning, about 65 degrees and no wind, and they started almost on time at a little after 7:00. As always a small group ran out way to fast for their ability and I found myself in about 10th place about a quarter mile in. I quickly started passing runners until I was right behind 2 other runners who were in 3rd and 4th place. The top 2 runner I knew are really fast and there was no hope of catching them, so I determined these 2 were my competition for 3rd place. Since I had run a tough climbing 13+ miler yesterday and my legs felt like jello during my almost 2 mile warm up, I wasn't expecting much today, but now that the race was on the adrenaline kicked in. I stayed behind both of the runners through a little over 1 mile when the lead guy started fading and we passed him easily. The first mile was 6:28, not too fast but a decent pace. I then ran on the shoulder of the other guy for a while. Our second mile was 6:31 so he ran a good consistent pace compared to the first mile. I really wasn't working at all at this point and could tell he was starting to breath hard. At 2.3 miles I decided to go ahead and pass him and ran by pretty easily. I knew I would do no better than third place and was not in the mood to hurt today so I coasted the 3rd mile in 6:19 and finished the last 0.2 with a 5:54 pace even though I didn't feel like I had picked up the pace. My finishing time was 20:33, my watch says at 5K I was 19:54. I was 3rd overall and first in my AG. I was happy to see I was still under 20 minutes on my 5K time, even on a tough course and the day after a tough run even though I have done just long slow running for about the past 6 months with exactly zero speed work or tempo runs.
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