Notes
There was an open race at Manchester Invite this year so Jake and I decided to run it. Those hills frigging suck. First hill for the start was terrible and I was off to a slow start. Slowly got my way close to the front, there wasn't a lot of competition so it was just Jake and one other kid. 5:26 first mile, great. First big hill was alright but still pretty slow, sped up on the flat part and passed the kid that was with Jake. I was getting close to Jake when we got to the second hill. That was complete garbage. Loose rock, sun in my eyes, I must have been going close to seven-minute pace up that thing. Was somehow able to speed back up after I got onto the only-a-slight-hill section right after it and passed the 2 mile mark at 11:11. I flew down the hill, not quite as fast as I wanted but still pretty fast, and was able to finally catch up to Jake. Gutted out the last part coming down the parking lot to keep as much momentum as I could, then just tried to survive for the zig zag to the finish. Ended up with an okay time but only 17 seconds better than my senior high school self on this course 5 years ago, and 53 seconds slower than my 5k from last week. I blame 100% of it on the hills, it is something I really need to work on. I will probably actually focus on that more after I start picking up the training after the marathon in November, and also plan to add in a healthy dosing of real, free-weight strength training. Even though I was somewhat disappointed by my performance it was still fun to run the course, and I won the open race too so there's that. Although I definitely got high schooled, looking at the varsity small and large school results a total of 11 damn kids beat my time. That shit ain't happening next year.