49F.
Out early this morning for 10.5 in the neighborhood, including 4 with Wade. Ran them slow, even for me, 8:47/mile, HR 145 bpm. Finished atvabout 6:00 a.m., including a PoP stop. Then after thinking it over I decided to drive downtown for a final four race, which turned out to be pretty cool even though I was alone.
I first noticed the race when we got a notification at work about downtown traffic flows over the weekend, which would be screwed up because of the "Final Four Marathon". I usually know when there is a marathon in town so I checked it out. Turned out to be the 4-mile variety.
Since I am now out of Ragnar, and since temperatures were ideal, I made a game-time decision this morning to run it. It was a late start, 8:30, so there was plenty of time. It was actually cold enough that I had to wear an extra shirt until just before the gun. Warmed up a couple of tenths, took my place in line and had to wait for the festivities. Very heavy military emphasis -- there was a wounded vet representing each of the teams. Each vet was either a single or double amputee, special forces in most cases. (IEDs are a despicable form of warfare. We only see the vets. There must be 10 or 20 amputee civilians back in Iraq and Afghanistan for every vet we see here.) Then an active duty sargeant sang the national anthem and she was excellent. I was pumped up when the race began, though I was crawling at the start because too many 11:00/mile runners were crowding the start line.
Another single amputee was actually running it with one of those spring legs, at a good clip, didn't catch him until about mile 1 -- seeing him was great, made my race and I told him so. He was gracious about it even though he was working very hard.
When the first mile came in at 6:30 I figured something was wrong; when the second one came in at 6:27 I thought maybe it would be the real deal. Then at mile 2.44 I saw the 2-mile marker, along with 15:19 on my watch, and the gig was up. Too many downtown buildings to measure accurately. It doesn't mean the course is accurate, but I have nothing better to go by than the claim that it is 4.00 miles. By my watch I had 6:52/mile overall speed, but my official speed was 7:22, still OK due to the previous miles this morning.
Finished 3rd in my age group, 10 seconds behind the second-place guy, though I didn't know it because he had the sense to start 3 seconds behind the gun. I was 30 seconds back. 71 overall out of about 2200 runners. As I think about it, maybe the course was long, because 7:22/mile shouldn't have been good enough for top 3%. I'll never know, though; it is clear looking at the Garmin upload that my watch had no idea where I was until I got out of downtown.
Ate some food and went home. Best t-shirt: "A lot of work for a free banana."
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