Unless I've got something longer to write up, I usually jot down my quick thoughts here in the Intrepid Racers topic for the week rather than race reports, so here's a quick update on my race...

Due to schedule challenges, my normal daily run on Saturday was later in the day, after spending the morning helping my brother with moving some boat stuff. So on Sunday morning I was a bit stiff and my legs that were just plain tired. Also on Saturday's jog my left hamstring had started cramping and Sunday morning it was tight and painful if I didn't limit my stride length. After a short (very short) warm-up jog at the race I could tell it would be a challenge to run splits much under 8:00, so I made the decision to that my goal for the day would be to find a pace at around 7:50s, settle into it and run steady splits the whole distance...to practice even pace without using much feedback from my watch.

Other than 1 split at mile 6 - 7 where we did some twisting, turning out and back to a turnaround cone, was able to do this....5KM splits were: 24:41 -> 24:45 -> 24:25 -> 24:01.  So that's about 7:52--ish overall.

This was a neat little race with about 175 runners on a rail-to-trail section of the East Coast bikeway. It was all hard-pack dirt, out and back on the trail. It was odd at times to just be running along through the trees for miles and miles, you had no good sense of distance covered like you get on a road where you see something off in the distance and run to it.

This is what the trail looked like: (that's not me running)

The finish line was definitely low key:

Which way?

Oh man, I would love to run that trail! Thanks for sharing MT.

Looks beautiful.  I would like to run that sometime. (just for fun)