I’ll admit it. Having never met Curtis Wheeler before, and seeing the pace he set from the very beginning, I fully expected him to blow up within a half mile and fall back to the crowd. Of course, I didn’t find out who he was until after the race, or else I would have known better.
Curtis beat everybody else by over a minute, so he must have taken it a little easy at some point. He was a good 25 to 30 seconds ahead of the chase pack at the first mile. I finally got to meet Tyler Jasud during the race, since he kept catching up to me during my rest intervals and eventually pulled ahead. We had a nice race through to the finish, but he had the stronger kick and edged me out at the line. Well done!
The weather was pretty good for running. I wouldn’t have minded the storm that came through 40 minutes to an hour after the race started, where the Back Cove path got flooded in a matter of about 20 seconds, but the lightning was probably only 10 miles away so it was better to have the nice soft breeze. At least the temperatures had dropped by about 15 degrees between lunch time and race time.
All in all, there were 135 finishers. There must have been some kind of camp or day care that took part in the race tonight, because there were quite a few children who participated. It was good to see a crowd like that. The total number of runners who have competed in at least 6 races has gone up to 53, 6 more than last week and 40 more people than there was through week 9 last year.
The two Daves didn’t do anything to improve their scores on the leader board tonight, but they still remain in positions 1 & 2. I dropped off another slower race tonight and jumped into 4th place, just 1 second behind Alex Bergo (1:56:26) who maintained 3rd place on the leader board but improved his time by 26 seconds tonight. I fully expect Tyler to jump immediately to the number 1 position on the board in 2 weeks or whenever he completes 2 more races.
For my own workout, today was the beginning of my speed training phase. I got a little longer of a warmup in than I really needed (around 5 miles) and I worked the pace down after 2.5 to 3 miles.
The goal during the race was to do Tabata Intervals (8x(20 seconds hard / 10 seconds easy)) then 4 minutes easy and repeat. I actually set my watch to do 2 minutes easy between sets, since I didn’t want that much rest.
I ran easy for the first couple of minutes to let the crowd thin a little, and then I got 3 sets in and extended the last interval through the 2 minutes easy and into the 4th set, so my last interval was around 2 minutes and 45 seconds instead of just 20 seconds.
If you do the math you’ll realize that it didn’t take me that long to run the race, and you’d be right. I messed up programming my watch so that I actually only did 2 minutes of Tabata Intervals before hitting my 2 minutes of rest. It was still a really good workout, but I will need to fix that before the next time that I try doing anything similar.
(Full Results – Leader Board – Photos)
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