My first age-group win!
So here is a picture of me, Brandon and Colin before the race. Colin is in his typically pose, sprawled out in his stroller relaxing!
I'll start off with a recap of Brandon's race as that was part of the reason why I was so amped up. I had been talking to Brandon for a while about running a race together and he decided he would come up and run his first road race in Maynard. He has been training hard for the past few months to come up and do it and he delivered on his promise in a big way. Before the race, he said he was going to run around 10:00 min/miles so after I finished we were waiting around and almost missed him coming up to the finish line because he actually ended up running 8:24 min/miles and finished in 26:34. I can tell you that most people when they run their first race or really any race typically will overestimate their ability and training but apparently Brandon had trained harder than he thought and the adrenaline of the race did him good. I do remember my first race last year and how it turned into quite an addiction so you never know, Brandon and I could be dueling it out next year for top honors.
Now onto my race recap. I knew I was going to be one of the faster runners in the race so I made sure to stay to the front which turned out to be easy because no one knew where the starting line actually was and I just made sure I stood in front of the mass of people. Here is pic of the start of the race:
Most of the people who finished in front of me are on the left hand side of the picture including the guy who sadly was running with a stroller and still ran 5:49 min/miles. The race started off with a pretty decent size hill up from the intersection above and that was really the only hill on the course. My goal was to see if I could run a comfortable first mile under 6:30 and if I was feeling good I would keep pushing it. My first split was 6:22 which gave me the green light to push hard and try to break 20 minutes. At this point, I saw about 3 people ahead of me and really no one behind me. One of those guys started to fall off and I passed one other and ran a 6:30 for the second mile, which concerned me slightly because the goal in 5Ks is to make sure that 2nd mile doesn't fall too far off target pace. I had to pick it up and I saw a younger high school kid in the distance that I tried to reel in during the last mile. He proved to be just a little too fast for me and I wasn't ever able to catch him despite a 6:15 closing split. At the end there was a dash to the finish and one of the guys I passed earlier had caught up and out kicked me to the finish to beat me by :02. I finished 7th overall in 19:29 and got my first ever age-group win which is great because once I turn 30 I move into the bracket where most of the legitimate road runners are.
