35F. My favorite running temperature.
As I said yesterday, they cancelled my 50k and the marathon due to icy conditions, but were confident enough in the HM course to let us all have a go on it. I was actually kind of impressed they didn't cancel everything, but I would much rather have stayed home than raced a HM when I'm not in that kind of shape.
Mile 10 has a long uphill bridge everyone there talks about, so I decided to run the first 10 miles at Lazy HM Pace (LHMP) and kick it in the last 5k to get a progressive-type workout that wouldn't require a long recovery.
First 10 @ LHMP: 6:23, 6:37, 6:27, 6:24, 6:33, 6:25, 6:17, 6:22, 6:21, 6:27. Mile 2 was really the only mile you definitely needed to slow down due to ice. The majority of the second half of the marathon was on those same trails so it was probably good they cancelled it; that wouldn't have been fun. Anyway, I enjoyed running the race with no expectations...basically not caring what happened. I made my way up the bridge from 9.0-9.5 at around a 6:40 pace, passing lots of people, then collected myself for a minute and started picking it up.
Last 5k(ish): 6:10, 6:09, 6:12, 1:10 for 0.2 (5:50). I think I only made 3 or 4 passes in this section as the field was already pretty stretched out, but it was nice to have so much in the tank at the end of a race - a completely foreign concept for me. The last mile was mostly uphill so I'm calling it a sub-6 in my head.
Skipped the medal, never saw the finisher shirts, chugged some free protein shakes and made it to my car in about 12 minutes. I'm still really disappointed about missing that 50k - I've wanted to do it for years but Boston has always been in the way. I'm going to try and find another one in the next few weeks, though it'll be on trails. The best thing that came out of this debacle was that I don't need 2 weeks to recover and my training won't take a big hit.
Official chip splits are below, the ones above are from Garmin. Not sure how I lost a place at the end, must have been someone behind me with a late start/chip. I was electronically passed!
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