I never do well... part one.

It's become our tradition to head to Cazenovia, NY to do their Fourth of July 10 miler.  It's a nice course, going around a big lake.  The first half is basically rolling and at 5 miles there's a nasty downhill that we generally run down as it's just too steep to race walk, and then an even bigger hill up.  Then the backside of the course constantly goes up and down.  The last two miles has some decent downs where you can really try to get your foot speed back up.  This would be the fourth year I've done it.   I was going into this race with no real expectations except to have fun.  I've had a fairly hard week of training, knowing I'll hit over 200K by the week's end.  So with all that distance I wasn't expecting a lot of foot speed, but knew the race was fun and would go out to enjoy it.  Dave also had a tough week of training, so we figured we'd go out easy together and then try to push the second half of the race.

The warm up was super rough.  I was barely able to break 7 per K pace, my legs were dead and I was tired.  I did manage some pickups and got some foot speed going, but not much.  I convinced Dave that we should start farther back in the pack at the start, both so that we wouldn't go slower than people at the front and get in the way, but also so we wouldn't be tempted to go out too fast.  Our first K was right around 6, and we thought uh-oh.  But we were having fun and chatting and enjoying being in a pack.  We were able to pick it up a bit after that first K and settled into about 5:40 per K pace, maybe a bit faster.  We hit the downhill quite well, and we were prepared for the uphill.  As we got too it I exclaimed, "I love this hill!"  And this runner behind us responded, "you must be joking!"  My response was, "I'd rather say that to myself than anything else."   But what happened up that hill was Dave and I passed probably 10 runners.  We charged it!  Dave got a bit ahead of me, about 10 meters or so, and as he passed one lady she said, "wow, he's really moving!"  I said, as a joke, "What about me?"  She looked at me weird.  I said, "Okay, I'll catch up to him then" and sprinted up there.  Then she realized I was race walking too :) 

Now that we were past the half way point (oh, one local person had a radio out there playing Bon Jovi's "Living on a Prayer"  which has the lyrics:  ohhhhhhh, half way there..... which was funny as heck.  Here's the video in case you don't remember the song  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDK9QqIzhwk    )  Dave started taking off a bit.  He got about 20-30 seconds a head of me.  We both started moving much better!  Then with about 3K to go there's a big uphill and then you start heading down.  Dave is generally stronger than me on up hills, while I can generally move better than him on the down hills.  However, I noticed on the uphill that I was catching him!  I was feeling great!  So I kept pushing.  I caught him right after the crest of the hill.  Then I started really pushing the downhill.  I think one of my miles was darned close to an 8 minute mile, which I was overjoyed with.  I pushed like crazy to the end, certain Dave was going to be chasing after me.  But when all was said and done I managed to get Dave by about 30 seconds at the finish line!  I ended up negative splitting by almost 3 minutes!  I was so happy, even though it was over 4 minutes slower than how I raced it last week.  I really pushed hard and got my legs moving.  

A young gentleman rode with us and ran the 5K.  He was supposed to do it as a workout and do it as a kickdown.  He ended up going out too fast, but still had a great race, placing 5th overall, second in his age group.  On the way home we were talking about stuff and he was saying how the night before he had his graduation party and had cake and goodies.  Then he said, "I never do well after I eat that stuff." 

There are a few groups of words that I really despise.  My top two are "I can't" and "I never..."  I'll do a post one day on the "I can't" but now I want to talk about "I never...."  However, I've just written a bunch, so I'll finish the rest in a second post.  My version of a cliff hanger :)