38F, 85%, NE 10 mph, drizzling. I didn't run Wednesday through Friday of this week because of a deal that was closing at work, some days bedtime was as late as 4:00 a.m. So I got a forced taper even though I intended to train through this race. I picked up Wade at 5:00 and we drove out to The Woodlands to run the half marathon. Smooth is here running the marathon I think, but I couldn't find her before the race and we had to leave immediately afterward as Wade is driving to Wyoming today. I'll have to figure out my placement a little later.
I PR-ed in this race exactly 3 years ago. Knew that wasn't in the cards today, as I have not been doing any workouts yet in this training cycle, other than one brisk run on Tuesday. Even if I had been, it might not be in the cards, just getting a little too old to run low 7s for this distance (or any other). Wade has been running well and this was a target race for him. He was hoping for a PR and missed it by less than 20 seconds, but adjusting for course length he actually ran faster than on his PR day. His plan was to go out slow then settle into goal pace by mile 3. My plan was to stick with him as long as I could. Both plans worked well. We ran the first mile in 7:52 and the second in 7:32, then down into the teens and twenties after that. I pulled up even with Wade after mile 4 and remarked that we had already caught the 7:26 guy. He was feeling good and I wasn't doing too badly, the pace felt somewhat sustainable. After that he got ahead of me and I never caught up. I figured if I was to catch him it would be with a push at mile 10, and only then if he was fading. Then at about mile 8.5 he caught his foot in a pavement crack and went down hard. I was 20 seconds behind at the time and saw it all. He bounced right back up and kept running faster than before; very impressive and I never caught him, he never faded. Finished about 20 seconds behind him.
My own race went well until miles 12 and 13, where I recorded a 7:42 and a 7:33. Other than that almost everything was in the twenties and teens and my overall pace was 7:28/mile, though the official pace will be slower than that because they only credit me with 13.11 miles (don't get me started). Got my new HRM strap in the mail this week and wore it this morning for the first time. I think it is recording accurately, but won't know for sure until working out with it a few times.
Mile by mile splits are: 7:52, 7:32, 7:20 (172), 7:16 (174), 7:32 (175), 7:14 (176), 7:27 (174), 7:19 (174), 7:27 (174), 7:31 (174), 7:30 (173), 7:41 (173), 7:33 (174) and 7:03 (174) for the stub.
So even though the heart rate was high it felt sustainable. I lost a little bit of concentration in miles 10-12, but otherwise kept a good steady effort. Part of my plan for March is to run 3 metric marathons, the first at 8:00, then 7:45 and finally7:30, on the theory that if I can hit 7:30 for 16 then I can hit sub-8:00 for 26, which would be a PR. Based on this morning's results that might be too slow, but it's hazardous to extrapolate race results onto 5 a.m. solo workouts.
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