Training Log Archive: iansmith

I parked at the school at about 7:43, but I already was dressed and had my bib on. I warmed up enough to break out a sweat - which wasn't enough, but better than nothing. The temperature was pleasantly cool, perhaps 15 C.

In a word, glacial. But this is about what is reasonable to expect of my running right now; this is a PR, though the two 10ks I have run had monstrous climb. I haven't raced much at this distance, and I was wary of going out too fast. I decided to run a conservative first two miles, then ramp up and push; there wasn't much of a difference between my initial effort and my ending paces apart from the downhill. I did have a little difficulty breathing despite my cetirizine, so I might find a little time in a non-allergy race. The climb was very mild.

About 5 km into the race, I started hearing a guy chatting with a child; I figured he was on a bike. Shortly thereafter, a man pushing a stroller pulled up beside me and gradually edged ahead of me. He looked speedy and strong. I stayed within about 10m of him until the last km, when I kicked ahead of him. After the race, according to a friend of Stephen Petrikalis, the guy is legit, though I think he was just out for a morning tempo run + munchkin and wasn't entered into the race. I finished tenth out of 487. The pace quartiles were 7:44/mi, 8:38/mi, and 9:31/mi.

Graceful like a charging hippo.

Cool down with Alex + scoring some swag. We had a fail later in the morning: after some delicious waffles at Chez Alex + Ed and Brendan joining us, we set out for Earl's Trails. We were inhibited by two traffic episodes: one residual one from earlier in the day when a bus went partway over the edge of a railing on a bridge by I-90 exit 17 in Newton and some unknown collision which stopped traffic on I-90 near I-84 for about an hour. We decided to turn around after 12:40p, when we were still 40 minutes away. A disappointing expedition, though we had good chits and chats in the car.