Race Report: Turkey Day 8K

Finished in 50:45 about 90 seconds faster than last year's time. And just like last year, I treated this run as training and decided to stick with tempo intervals.

5 min easy jog to get warmed up and with a 38° start, I absolutely needed it.

Then the intervals which were run 3 minutes at a 8:45 - 9:30 pace with a 2 minute recovery walk in between. The first 3 miles felt great but most of the first half of this course is downhill or flat so keeping a 9 minute pace wasn't that hard but once I hit those hills in Hampton Heights and on Spring Street, I had a very hard time keeping it below a 10 minute pace. Still the 3:2 intervals worked out quite well.

According to my Garmin Forerunner, my active time was 32 mins and covered 3.5 miles so an average pace of 9:28 which was my goal so I'm happy about today's run.

Race Report: Run the Falls 8K

I’ve done many 5Ks up to this point but this was my first 8K and I was surprisingly relaxed and confident about it. I was familiar with the first and last mile of the course and knew the middle 2.9 miles were rolling hills much like the hills I normally train.

It was a cold 43° and cloudy at the start and I didn’t want to shed my fleece jacket but knew I would overheat if I didn’t so I threw it in the car and lined up with about 3 mins before start time. At 8:00am, we were off.  It took me nearly 1.5 miles to finally warm up but I wish I wore gloves since my fingers were the only thing that stayed cold throughout the entire run. I had no trouble breathing in the cold air (thanks to the high humidity…I’m learning that it’s dry air and not cold air that causes breathing problems) but my nose decided to join the run and that became quite annoying to say the least. The sun would try to break through the thin layer of clouds but never did come out in full force to warm things plus their was a gentle but cold breeze.

The first mile was downhill, then the next 2 miles were a series of up and down hills through the River Falls neighborhood with a long slow uphill to the finish line (the final 1/2 mile is a pretty good climb). And it was that last mile going uphill where I really started to struggled but not with my breathing but with my quads and glutes which were telling me they have had enough. All those hills really took it out of my legs but I am so glad I did hill repeats in training, it really helped me get up most of them without wasting too much energy and it was were I was able to do the most passing, which always feels good.

With about a quarter mile left, my legs were really starting to feel heavy and as soon as I approached the top of that final hill and knew it would be flat for the last 200m, I gave it one last push and to my surprise finished well under my 55 minute goal with a time of 53:56. After reviewing my Garmin data, I quickly realized I ran a faster pace on this race then I did on my fastest 5K race and that was like icing on the cake.