Finish Line Sports 30k

Sugar Land, TX - December 15, 2013

1:20:30 (8:39 min/Mi) - First 15k

1:24:04 (9:02 min/Mi) - Second 15k

2:44:34 (8:51 min/Mi) - 317th out of 1340 runners

This was an interesting and fun race.

32 degrees at the start of the race, with wind chill to 28 degrees. I slept 4 hrs the night before (Xmas party). I am still recovering from IMCZ two weeks ago. Barely did anything since IMCZ. But I sure have been eating well :)

At the start, my Garmin wouldn’t locate the Satellites. The gun went off and I started it, but it wasn’t showing anything but elapsed time. This went on until after I hit mile 1. It finally started working. Unfortunately because of that, I was never able to see what pace I was averaging for the race. At least I could see my current pace.

The race started quite fast. The adrenaline of everyone starting out, the freezing cold weather, had everyone out fast. I couldn’t tell, but I thought I ran my first mile around 8:00 min/Mi. After a while, people started spreading out, and I settled into my pace. Since my Garmin wasn’t working, I decided to try to do the race looking as little as possible at the Garmin. I was going to run mostly by feel.

I felt pretty good once I warmed up. I kept a steady pace, and started knocking the miles. I started feeling my legs getting pretty tired right around half way, especially my quads, but it didn’ slow me down much. I wanted to make sure to keep the pace till I went by the Half Marathon distance. I was pretty happy to see that I unofficially PR’d my Half Marathon time by almost 5 minutes.

The last 5 miles were becoming tougher. My quads were really hurting now. But I kept pushing, and tried to stay close to the same pace. I knew I was slowly starting to slow down. But it wasn’t so bad, until the last 2 miles. By this time, I was having a hard time moving my legs, taking each step. I noticeably slowed down. I kept trying to speed up a little bit, here and there, but I couldn’t keep it going. I was happy with my effort, and that I didn’t just give up and jogged back in. I slowed down, yes, but only about 30 to 45 sec/Mi. The last 0.5 mile, the adrenaline took over, and I was able to speed up a bit again, and made a hard push till the line.

I was pretty happy with my effort today. I beat my previous 30k best time by over 5 minutes. I was pretty surprised I was able to maintain that effort, only two weeks removed from an Ironman. I am definitely feeling it now :)