Hanging out with Anders post-race! :)
Let's start out by saying that it has been a gorgeous day. I'm writing this with with a cuddly baby sitting in my lap while Quinn and Philip play/work outside. My parents flew home from Honduras last night and spent the night in Seward so they could take care of the boys tomorrow morning while we ran. How awesome is that?! Philip and I got up at 6am and were out the door an hour later headed to Lincoln. Race temps were supposed to be 34 degrees at race start and 38 degrees an hour later. No wind and sunshine. These are definitely ideal racing conditions.
A couple weeks ago, Philip had asked me if I wanted to run this race with him. At the time, I wasn't really sure, but when I woke up this morning, I once again was not feeling my competitive drive. Running with my husband sounded so much nicer. The night before, we'd plugged in his time from the Leprechaun Chase 10k (44:51) into McMillan's Running Calculator. If you haven't used this tool, I recommend you check it out. You can type in your time for any race distance and it will spit out the time that you could run in other distances. Philip's projected time was 1:15. After waking up and talking it over with Philip, we decided that we were going to go for this time...it would mean a 7-minute PR for Philip as he ran 1:22 last year.
The course is out and back starting at the State Farm building on 84th and O. After looping around the building, you jump onto the Mopac Trail and run out 5 miles and (you guessed it!) turn around for the back half. I think that our first mile was somewhere under 7 and by mile two were were running about 7:10 pace. After that, I stopped looking at the watch but it seemed like we'd settled into a better grove for our goal. For the first five miles, we ran with the same group and started to see the lead runners coming back shortly after we hit mile 4. Heading back, the trail got pretty congested...at one point, I felt a little claustrophobic when a group of maybe 10 runners were coming at our group of 5. But heck, it's awesome that so many people were out there putting in the miles!
We hit mile 8 right around 59 minutes. I could tell Philip was starting to tire a little bit, but if we didn't keep up our pace, we would not hit the goal time. Although Philip and I have done many of races together, we have not actually run many together....so I wasn't sure what to say to him that would be motivating but not annoying. If you are a runner, you know that those last couple miles can be brutal. And peppy, happy people sometimes are the last thing you want to deal with. I said, "Philip, this race doesn't really matter. Neither does the time we finish in. But what DOES matter is our mental toughness and this, RIGHT NOW, is a chance to get stronger." Philip and I both want to eventually finish an Ironman Triathlon...2.4 mile swim, 112 miles on the bike, finished by a full marathon--26.2 miles. We are both going to need to be ridiculously mentally tough to take that on. I do not know how many years it will be until we accomplish this goal, but we can start working on being tough now. And running as hard as we can when we're tired is a good place to start.
We ended up finishing the race in 1:14:33. Big high five to Philip for being a trouper!
So...how did I feel? Well, according to the McMillan calculator (using my Leprechaun Chase time), I capable of going 1:07:50. If I am being honest, I do not think I would have come anywhere close to this time. I do not even know if I would have went 1:10. This worries me quite a bit. I know that everyone has "off" days, and I know it takes runs that do not go as we'd like to really appreciate the good ones. However, the Lincoln half is only a month out. As we drove home, Philip and I talked about how we can REALLY use April. In the past, I have found that very long runs and long repeats (like mile and two mile repeats) have helped me the most in the half, so we decided to do a 15-miler together sometime in the next couple of weeks. I am also going to decide exactly what speed workouts are going to benefit me the most.
I hope you all had a great weekend and hope you were able to get outside and run. I saw on Facebook that several of you knocked out some amazing long runs...18 and 20 miles?! No big deal for you some of you. Wow.
Happy Running! :)
Official Race Results can be found here: http://www.onlineraceresults.com/event/view_event.php?event_id=12744
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