With River to River coming up I thought it might be a good idea to get the feeling of racing back in my legs, so early this week I started looking for a weekend 10k. Turns out that Easter weekend is not a popular one for holding races. But I did find a group in San Francisco called the Dolphin South End Runners that holds low-key races in San Francisco every Sunday for just $5, which is about half the cost of gas for a round trip to the city. This week they had a "Rollercoaster 5k". So even though it wasn't a 10k I tried it out.
Turns out they didn't call it a rollercoaster for nothing. Here is a course map. Turn on the elevation chart. See that sharp dip and rise back up in the middle? That is one city block of pure steep hill (the turnaround was right at the bottom of the hill). I led the race from the start until just after getting back up that steep hill; the guy chasing me probably made up lots of ground because I lost my form on the downhill (as a result of fatigue from the previous uphill), and then went by me shortly after the climb back up. I kept him in sight but never was able to challenge for the lead; he wound up beating me by 12 seconds. Considering the steepness of the hills I'm pretty happy with my time of 18:11.So it was good practice for the hilly terrain of Little Egypt, and a lot of fun, lots of cool people there. I'm definitely showing up for their 10k in Golden Gate Park next weekend.
4 comments:
18 minutes? On a course that hilly? Gees! And you deign to run on relay teams with slow pokes like me! I feel fast by association :-)
*whistle* You're SMOKIN' fast!
[ok, my fellow scientists, you must upgrade to beta so that I don't have to login twice, and type every comment twice. It's all about me, you know that right? RIGHT?!?!]
I'm balancing it out by running River to River with a team whose goal is to run the 80 miles in 8 hours (6-minute mile pace) on similarly hilly terrain. We usually come close.
I think the best thing about racing is that there are faster people there. I don't get passed very often on training runs (even when I run at popular parks), but in races there are usually a few guys ahead of me. Next week, though... there won't be anyone ahead of me, this dude is going down! :)
And, definitely, whoever can put this blog on the beta should do it! Unless there is a good reason not to do it!
Either we can't switch right now, or I am imcompetent (which often is the case!) I clicked on the link on how to upgrade and I it said this:
"The new version of Blogger is going to start out small, so only a low percentage of people who log in to Blogger will see the option to switch over. If you're one of them, you'll see a blue box in the sidebar of your dashboard highlighting the new version of Blogger."
I see no blue box on the sidebar of my dashboard!
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