Went to bed early last night. Laid out my clothes – even pre-attached the ChampionChip timing chip to my shoe, and pre-pinned my bib number to my shirt.
Yep. I was ready for the Run Like Hell 5K this morning.
I didn’t dress up. I think about a third of the runners had some sort of costume on. I wore a thin long-sleeved green tech shirt with a black short-sleeved tech shirt over, shorts, a cap, and my Brooks Adrenaline 6 (the ones with MoGo). No music – I was serious. A snack of a cup of yogurt just to get my engine running and I went out to the bus stop.
Weather was good – around 50° F, no rain, a little wind. After yesterday’s downpour it felt good.
Maybe I should have brought the music, though. I think the mile markers weren’t set up right. I didn’t hit the first mile marker until almost 11:00 from when I crossed the starting line. I felt way faster than that. Then the next mile was uphill the entire way, and I hit the 2 mile sign at under 19:20 – which would have meant I ran uphill at at 8:30 pace or so. I was keeping basically the same pace!
Since I was doing so well by mile 2, I decided to push a bit until the end. That was made easier by being essentially downhill the whole way. When I turned off of Front Ave. onto Taylor again, and I could see the finish line, I felt good and did not look at my watch.
So I was disappointed when I saw the official clock showing 30:00 already. I knew that there was about 30-45 seconds difference between gun time and my chip time, but, damn. I stopped my watch as I crossed the line and it showed 29:45 – a 9:45 pace or so.
I hung around afterward to check out the costumes, and was still there when they posted the official results: 29:47 for me. Fuck. I’m trying to be positive and all but I was sure I’d done better than that!
There’ll be other races. I showed up and I gave it what I had in me for today.