Notes
Bix2k17. Mixed feelings about this race-definitely both positives and negatives to take away from it. I felt that the race went out fairly controlled. I lead the chase pack about 50 meters back of the lead pack in 5:23. After the mile its mostly downhill and i made a small move to pick it up. Didn't really feel that smooth at this point but wasnt laboring either. Second mile was like 4:53. At this point i had been in no man's land for over a mile. As i approached the turn onto jersey ridge, borowsky caught up to me so that got me to engage a little a more. i sat with him for a little bit and then surged up mcclellan leaving him behind. used the downhill to gather myself again but i think i was slowing too much on these. dan caught me right before the turnaround so after the 180 i was with him for a bit. by the time we had climbed mcclellan he was a bit ahead and i was right with finch. worked the downhill a bit but my left hip had been tightening up for about a mile now. i wanted to get up there with dan but my stride was getting pretty limited and i knew the toughest miles were still to come. let finch go a bit and then tried to change my stride so that i would open up. i caught finch on the hill ending mile 5 but my hip was too tight so i split my watch here (at the end of mile 5). miles 3,4,and 5 were 5:07, 5:10, and 5:22, respectively. after splitting my watch at the start of the 6th mile i jogged for a bit. i felt bad doing it because i was losing a lot of ground and obviously in an ideal world i could actually race the whole race and have no health issues but ive been dealing with this tightness all summer and its not going away until my body gets acclimated to official workouts again. probably a quarter to third of mile into the 6th mile i started to loosen up a bit and slowly increased pace. i was still getting passed by a bunch of people i should beat but i just wanted to leave the day healthy. it was nice to see most of the people passing me be teammates but there were a handful of other d3 guys i would've liked to grind with. oh well,sometimes you have to swallow your pride for the benefit of something bigger than yourself. i hit the 6th mile in a blazing 5:54 but thankfully my hip was starting to loosen. at this point nolan passed me on brady street. i went to go with him but when i passed him he didnt come with. going down the hill dom rolled by me because i was still holding back a bit instead of letting loose. he said, "lets fucking go pussy" which i thought was hilarious but also what i needed at the time. i yanked off my jersey and started going HAM down the hill to help a teammate out. caught him at the bottom of the hill and was rolling. we made the turn and caught argeni soon enough. we all closed pretty hard and i ended up being slightly ahead of them at the finish but with chip times i was behind both of them online. Last mile was 4:42 and last .03 on my watch was 7 seconds OVERALL, not the greatest of days for me. aerobically, i felt pretty good. didnt really feel tired at any point (probably because i went super slow on the hardest mile). kinda disappointed that i felt great aerobically but still wasnt able to get the body to fully cooperate with me for 35ish minutes. happy that i closed the back door for the team and that i was able to be somewhat accountable to them (thank you Dom). i was happy with my ability to surge up hills even with my extremely limited hill training this summer being in naperville. i think my weak point was the downhills though because my turnover seemed to be really lacking- i think some of this may be due to my lack of feeling smooth too and hopefully this will be fixed as i regain the specificity of official workouts. finally, although i didnt have the greatest of days and know that i can go substantially faster, i still did PR and i was our 7th or 8th guy running still a decent time which means the team did very well and i was glad we had so many guys come together and have great experiences across the board