Capital Pursuit Race Report (a week late)

First off, I found this on a friend's blog... I laughed until I cried... For me personally, it was even more funny to do it to myself.

I just loved seeing my masters research described as:

Danielle is compar'n measizzles of dissipizzle of turbulent kinetic energy wit an acoustic Brotha hustla n a temperature microstructure instrument. She measured temperature microstructure in a field experiment ta estimate blingin' in a bubble plume.

Word, yo.

Sheesh, this week has been crazy. This 10-miler was a week ago and I still haven't written a recap. Which, considering it went awesome, I am surprised I haven't been driven to write about it sooner. In fact, I had another race yesterday to write about, but I will put that off until tomorrow.

Well, first off I want to give mad props to Shaun for coming in second in his age group in this 500 person race. And he wasn't even trying. I hate him. He won some gloves. Ya, the bling was most definitely lacking at this race...

Anyways, I went in going "Okay, I only need to do this at my half-marry pace, which to PR is only 10:30." But in my head I knew I would be annoyed if I only paced 10:30 on this race since I did it at 10:15 last year, and I limped the second half of the race. In fact last year I did the first half at 10 min pace and the second half at 10:30. So today I went in to this race saying, "Do the first half at 10:30. If I finish at 10:30, that is fine. But if I am feeling okay, I am going for the negative split to match my pace from last year, so a 10 min pace for the second half." That was my game plan. Because miles 7-10 are downhill, this is actually not a hard race to negative split in. This is also good practice for me since I always go out too fast. So my primary goal for today was to negative split, no matter what the pace.

So I started and I whenever I would start breathing heavy I would let up. I tried really really hard to be between 10:15 and 10:30 for the first five miles. If I got caught up running with someone and my GPS said I was going too fast, I would drop back. But I was having a good day and I hit mile 5 at 50:40 and I wasn't tired. But then I was like "Oh shit, now I have set a pretty high bar for the negative split," considering that this pace was faster than I wanted to do the whole thing at.

So, I just picked someone ahead of me, ran to catch up with them, ran with them for a bit, picked another person to catch, etc etc... I came in at 1:38:25, so below a ten minute pace, four minutes faster than last year, and with a second half split of 47:45. And my last mile was 9:15.

Total rockstar finish. I need to adopt this strategy a hell of a lot more often. I felt good the entire race. My breathing was also a lot slower and more even the entire time. I might even say that I had fun! I never have fun while racing. I have fun while running, but I am usually killing myself during an entire race, so fun isn't a good descriptor.

So there is now a half-marathon attack strategy. Beware Toronto, beware... I shall have my revenge... The best part is that this race also is more downhill in the second half:

Okay, there does appear to be an uphill at the end. That's not cool. Big mean Canadians.

Next up: Two girls who lost battles with cars on their bikes rock the Pi Mile run...