Proof once again that sleep the night before a race is overrated. I was up and down all night -- and then nailed a 31-minute PR in a half-marathon. OK, so the previous PR was at the 13.1 mark of a full mary where I was on the verge of a full-bore bonk, but hey, a PR is a PR.
Goal today was to string together 13 miles at somewhere around 7:45. The even pacing was not there -- splits ranged from 7:32 to 7:49 until I kicked in the last mile and a quarter -- but the overall pace was pretty much exactly where I wanted it. I was fortunate that there were runners just ahead of me that I could lock on. Didn't care if I caught them, but I wanted to keep up with their pace, and I did. Then I ended up passing most of them in the last two miles anyway. The final downhill (more on that in a bit) really seemed to slingshot me toward the finish and I passed several people in the last half-mile to finish 43rd overall out of 496 entries. Average pace based on chip time: 7:41. Not bad for an old dude who couldn't run around the block in June 2007.
This was a brand new race, and I'm not that familiar with Conway, so the course was a bit of an open question. I was told beforehand that there was a decent sized hill at about mile 3. That info was correct; there were a couple of other semi-significant inclines, but also some good downhills. I was able to shorten my stride and rest some on the downhills until the last one at about 12.3 miles, which I pushed pretty hard. Overall, the course was challenging, but not brutal. And the weather was ideal -- 45 at the start, warming into the low 50s during the race, no wind, no clouds. Some cloud cover would have been nice (I hate squinting into the sun), but there was a fair amount of shade along the course, so that helped. The course was kind of a lopsided figure 8 -- four miles on the first loop, eight plus miles on the much bigger loop, with the start and finish about three quarters of a mile from the intersection of the two loops.
The reason I picked the pace I did is that I figured a 1:41 or 1:42 finish correlated pretty well with the pace I'll need to BQ in Memphis. Think I don't have some confidence now? Yes, I tapered more than Sasha would recommend, but I figure the added confidence is worth more than 10 or 15 miles of routine training, and I still have three weeks to bust it before the real taper begins. Especially now that I KNOW that my hard work is paying off in faster times. | 