Had some good & some bad in this race. My main goal was sub 1:30 (didn't do it :( ) with backup goal to get a 45-49 AD personal PR (did it :) ). The weather/temps were near ideal, occasionally a bit of head wind but pretty close to perfect so I thought sub 1:30 should have been doable without killing myself. But I'm finding that as I get older and with all my "itis-s" I've accumulated over the years with my tendencies to over-train it's just a lot harder to have those super-duper races. In hindsight I should have been paying more attention to my actual splits and less to the Garmin as I think down the canyon the watch glitched a bit and measured about .1 long for the race. Mile 11 also really did me in, all that trail weaving around, up/down, under the road, etc. stuff really got to me mentally and got me off pace by 20-30 seconds. But for some reason I was still thinking if I ran the last 2 miles under 7 min I was on track for sub 1:30. I was pretty bummed when I got to mile 13 and could tell there was no way to get the sub 1:30 even with 6:15-6:30 pace effort the last little bit. Split info with actual pace from Garmin and goal pace in ( ): Mile 1 - 7:01 (6:50 hill came earlier than expected) Mile 2 - 7:03 (7:20 less hill than expected) Mile 3 - 7:01 (6:55 feeling like I ran first 2 miles a tad faster than planned so back off a bit) Mile 4 - 7:02 (7:00 getting excited for some good downhill) Mile 5 - 6:38 (6:40) Mile 6 - 6:47 (6:40 no sure what happened here, thought I was on pace. Had a strange bout of momentary dizziness sometime around here, thought things could get real ugly but then it went away and I felt pretty good for a while) Mile 7 - 6:52 (7:00 Garmin glitching thru these miles I think) Mile 8 - 6:46 (6:40) Mile 9 - 6:26 (6:25) Mile 10 - 6:36 (6:35) Mile 11 - 7:01 (6:40 - I really blew it here, starting to hurt and all the zig/zip/up/down action of running on trail vs. roads throws me way off mentally, I nearly decide to pack it in and jog it in but was able to somewhat overcome the mental issues and pass a couple of runners) Mile 12 - 6:56 (6:55 pleased I was able to get some mental focus back for this very painful mile) Mile 13 - 6:59 (7:00) Too little too late at the end, forgot to stop the watch so not sure on last little bit but I know the Garmin was giving me paces in the 6:15-6:30 range as I tried in vain to shave some seconds and get closer to 1:30. All in all an OK race, I've had plenty better but also plenty worse. Now I hope I can recover enough the next 3 weeks to be ready for UVM 1/2 and give sub-1:30 another try. Anyone have an opinion whether UVM 1/2 is faster or slower than Ogden 1/2? I'm thinking they're probably pretty close. Good to see a few folks from the blog and impressed to see a number of very stellar performances. Big congrats to Kim for finishing marathon #1 of 4 (Grand Slam) in one piece and in being smart and mostly treating it as a training run and not pushing the pace!
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