Notes
Saratoga Invitational. New 6k course at SPAC.
Ah, the good ol' alumni race. Wasn't in particularly good shape for this one. Had a rough summer, much like the previous year. Although this one was rough due to injury and work, but the last one was mostly just injury.
I still had a lot of cannolis in me during this race, which had me worried. The race went off alright, except for the huge bottleneck at about 400m in, when people started crashing into the posts on the path that lead into the woods. Geoff Williams had the right idea, since he got right past them by going out hard for the photo op. But anyway, I just kind of ran through the woods to the side of the path. Had to jump some stumps and shrubs, and whack away some branches, but it wasn't too bad.
Tried to settle into a reasonable pace after that. Just tried to find some people to run with, and then find targets ahead of me when I needed motivation. Was doing alright with that, but about 1 mile into the race, my stomach started acting up. The problem gradually built up, but never got unbearable. Stomach was kind of doing flips, but never felt like I had to slow down a ton. It held me back from throwing in surges, but more annoying than anything.
When I got back into the woods at the end, I tried to find my final targets to gun down. There was this one blond guy ahead of me who kind of looked like Jake, so running after him made me feel fast. But he was gunning down some other guy, so I had to chase both of them. Caught up to Fake Jake in the woods, but he started kicking right before we got out in order to catch Otherguy. They gapped me a bit, but I chased them down. They kept throwing on more surges on the grass, so I kept pushing to get back up with them. Sadly, they worked things out better than I did, and they both ended up beating me. Oh well. At least I didn't poop my pants.
All things said and done, I'm content with this time. Was hoping to be closer to 22 minutes even, maybe even below that, but I'm not gonna lose any sleep over this. Well, actually I literally did lose sleep in order to get to the race, but yeah. Cannolis definitely made this race have an interesting factor.