Lactate By the Sea

Today we had the 5-mile race in St Andrews. Here are the speedy runners at the start ...


... and a slightly less speedy guy at the end ...


The weather was great, it was a good turnout with some familiar faces, and the course is very nice. Mike is one of the co-directors of the race, so he wasn't running it, but was doing things like this ...
and this ...

Cam ran the 1k kids race too. He was so fast, that I missed taking photos of his finish as I was chatting away with Phil Booker! Here's Cam doing some stretching before the race - injury prevention, of course.

Here's the group of kids lined up to get their medals at the end of the race.


As for my race, check out these splits, showing my time for each of the eight kilometers, then tell me I didn't start out too fast, even if it was a downhill beginning.

4:09
4:29
4:40
5:00
5:49
5:08
5:05
5:29

I realize I still stink at running hills, as I took short walk breaks three times on the hills during the race today. I've taking to doing more of my training lately on some of the steeper/longer Fredericton hills, but I still have lots of work to do.

Here is an interesting note that shows I probably also need to work on my pacing. Compare my splits above to the splits from my tempo run of last Tuesday. The first 2k and the last 3k of that run were warm up/cool downs (sort of ... a bit of the third k was also a warm up). My time for the middle 8k was almost identical (even a few seconds faster!) than the race today. A couple of things about that tempo run: 1) while I was pushing it, I wasn't giving it a "full" effort, and 2) that run even included 2k as a warm up, so it's not like I was starting out fresh on those middle 8k. Finally, while there aren't really long steep hills around my neighborhood, it's does have stretches of hills, so it's not exactly flat. The numbers, with the tempo k's italicized ...

5:43
5:23
5:14
5:04
4:50
4:52
4:53
4:55
5:22
4:50
5:14
5:28
5:26

To wrap this post up, a note on my training, as this past week marked my first of eighteen weeks of official marathon training. I did five runs instead of the called for four, and swapped the 12 mile "long run" with today's 5 mile race. In the end, the total mileage for the week ended up being just about what the plan called for. The fun begins!