my makeup may be flaking

The plan was to run 5:45 pace in the early miles and then just hang on. I didn't really know how I would respond, but I figured that a 1:16 was probably the best I would be able to do.

The response was that I felt like I was running in Molasses. I don't just mean that my legs felt heavy, but also that I was heavy a hard to breathing because Molasses was going up my nose.

The first few miles were reasonable fast (5:27,2&3 5:38 avg,5:35). My legs were willing but I felt like I was redlining it aerobically. As the road flattened out I had a hard time maintaining and ran 5:48, 5:55 for mile 5 and 6. I knew that I was in trouble as those two miles were still going downhill.

Normally I welcome gentle rollers and I was happy to see them today, but my breathing kept getting totally out of control. I pushed really hard in miles 7&8 but only got 6:03 and 6:04. At this point I was weaving all over the road. Still, I told myself, these are maybe the fastest miles I've run in months and I just ran 8 of them in a row.

I kind of slowly lost it the last 5 miles and I knew that I would have to work hard to beat my 1:19 from 2009. Glancing back a few times, I could see that there were people behind me getting closer. I ran 6:23 for mile 9. I remember surging on an uphill on mile 10 and managing 6:14. Looking back I could see people were closer and there were 3 miles left.

I was waiting for the inevitable at this point. I slowed again to 6:22 for 11 and 6:32! for 12. I was pretty out of it at this point, but I didn't think I had much left. With 1 mile to go, I was maybe 20secs up on MarkP and I felt confident I could hold onto that. I raised my pace as much as I possibly could: a measly 6:16 last mile.

Despite those terrible final miles I still managed to average 6 flat pace. Even though this is pretty bad for me by typical racing standards, I'm not upset at all. For one thing, I just got back to running. For another, I ran like 10000miles this week. And for yet a third, this race was at even higher elevation than I'm used to and I've always had difficulties with altitude (stupid low VO2 max).

Positives: If I had run 1:16 I still would have finished 5th, but if I had run 2.5 mins slower, I would have finished much lower down. Anyway, I'm currently beating Jake in the Circuit so HA!

Also, running this race early gives me something to compare future races to.

Finally, I didn't feel any problem today with my knee or achilles. My calves are sore, which is something I need to be careful about, but they are sore in a good way.

After the race I cooled down with Devra, Allie, MarkP and Tera. To me, this was just as hard as the race as I could barely keep up with them.