Is it legit to do a race report for an 8k?
What the hell, I rocked a 57 sec PB and finally got my 50 VDOT, so I'll do it anyway...
I was not targeting a particular time goal in this race and made no attempt whatsoever to taper. My strategy was to put in a nice hard effort and see where things ended up. We had an EN group for the first outdoor ride of the season yesterday where I threw out the OS workout and rode for 2.5 hrs including the last 1.5 at very high intensity (incl 42:00 at IF1.045). So that plus 5 extra pounds on the scale this week did not set the stage for an 'optimized' race, but I have been posting some really good splits in the run workouts over the past month so I knew even 'less than optimal' could be a PB. I did have in the back of my head that I wanted to get the sub-33:00 that has eluded me to-date, and of course I knew that 32:40 would mean finally achieving the elusive 50 VDOT.
Well he weather was pretty well perfect and when the results were tallied I managed a 32:09 (6:29 pace), 57 seconds off my prior PB, new VDOT 50.95!!
With a 10am start time (no doubt out of respect for the prior night's St. Paddy's festivities) I was unsure of how to manage the nutrition strategy. Luckily the red curry from the restaurant the night before had a lot of rice, so I figured I shouldn't eat anything. So I ate 2 bites of a waffle that I made for my kids at about 8:30am, then had a gel 20 mins prior to the race chased with half a small bottle of Gatorade.
I should also note that I ate a ton on Friday too, to the point where my weight – which has been hovering in the 137-138 range for the past 8 weeks – clocked in at 142.5 this morning. So I haven't exactly been fasting!
My wife drove me to the race so the warmup was literally zero. Not even running in place. But in most of my recent workouts I've been laying down great "warmup" splits that rival my z4 efforts. So I wasn't concerned.
In the starting corral I reminded my buddy Andrew that we shouldn't get caught up in all the idiots sprinting out of the gate, then we started. Of course I looked at my watch a minute into the race and it said 6:07. A minute later it was still at 6:15. So I told Andrew that we had to slow down. And we did. In fact, our first mile ended up at a 6:22 pace, and that conscious effort to pull back probably saved our race.
From then on it was just the usual 8k run. Go hard, and when you think you'll need to stop right then and there, just keep going! At around mile 2.5 I kept motivated by trying to pass a woman up ahead who I thought was the 1st place woman (although it turned out she was the second place woman…the first place one was 3rd OA with a 30:05). At mile #4 I knew I could run a 7:00 pace and still go sub-33:00 but I wasn't able to calculate on the fly if I was in the running for the 50 VDOT. So instead I concentrated on the two guys ahead of me and trying to chase them down. I passed them both at about 4.7 miles and then was soon in sight of the finish line. Within sight of the big finish clock I knew I was in really good shape although 32:00 was out of reach. One of the two guys who I passed had turned on the jets and passed me and despite my best efforts there was no way I could keep up.
Splits:
Split |
Time |
Distance |
Avg Pace |
1 |
6:23.3 |
1.00 |
6:22 |
2 |
6:24.2 |
1.00 |
6:23 |
3 |
6:31.2 |
1.00 |
6:31 |
4 |
6:34.0 |
0.99 |
6:36 |
5 |
6:15.9 |
0.97 |
6:26 |
In the end it was 32:09, 13th overall and 2nd in my AG. It turned out that the dude who cruised by me at the end was also M3539 and won our AG by 3 seconds. Even if I knew that I doubt I could have done anything about it at the very end. Actually it is surprising that the winner of M3539 was as deep as 12th OA.
Oh, then the EN meetup/brunch fell apart so I decided to run home. And actually that run ended up being pretty damn fast, too – 2.87 miles in 19:22, 6:45 pace:
Split |
Time |
Distance |
Avg Pace |
1 |
10:32.0 |
1.53 |
6:54 |
2 |
8:50.2 |
1.34 |
6:35 |
So overall a great race to start the springtime!
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