Notes
Brittney was planning on running this 5k and I needed to get in a run. So I figured I would tag along and get in some solid miles. The race is typically won in 17:30 and doesn't have prize money so I figured no one would show up and I could coast to a win without having to work too hard. Based on that, I headed out for a longer warmup and about 4 miles into it I saw Nate Hopp running around. I've typically beat him head to head in races but he has been running well and I wasn't mentally prepared to run very fast.
So the race got out at a solid pace with Nate and myself leading it. Ryan Schlafbach (former Luther sprinter that joined the ISU run club) was also with us. At times the pace felt hard from the miles yesterday and this morning, and at other times I was able to feel comfortable. We went through the mile together right around 5 minutes. Around the halfway point I somehow got a few steps on the other two guys. I was planning on just waiting until the finish and then trying to beat them but since they were already hurting a bit, I tried to keep up the pressure. The problem was, I was also hurting. I couldn't make any solid move to really drop them so instead I slowly pulled away from them. I wasn't really sure how far we had run as we started coming back toward the start/finish, so to prepare for a possible extra loop I just kind of maintained pace instead of pushing for the finish. After I saw the turn to the finish I picked it up a little but I still had a comfortable 10 second lead so it didn't matter much. Ryan ended up 2nd and only 8 seconds behind me.
I'm pretty happy to run that kind of time while trying to get in some decent mileage. We ended up taking a wrong turn so people were saying the race was about .1 short. I'm still happy with the time.