Notes
Well...it's over? Not sure exactly what to put in the race report, other than it was incredibly difficult to race today. The race was called at 4:30 due to the extreme heat (almost 90), high humidity (almost 100%), no wind, and no cloud cover. Obviously time was not a goal, but beyond that I felt like I couldn't even really race, which was a huge disappointment.
During my morning shake out run at 5am, I felt great - super confident, super strong. I ate breakfast around 6am, drank about 16oz of water before the race. I went out with the lead group, but after a 5:35 decided to pull back a bit. I held on to a pretty even pace in terms of effort (the hills accounted for the different mile split times) through the belt line where I was running with Eli. Around mile 7 is where the race started to get tough. I think the heat just caught up with me and I couldn't quite find my legs or motivation. I had a hard time over the last few days staying cool and I think I'd just built up some exhaustion. I also think that much of the second half of the training cycle saw me pretty overwhelmed and not really able to deal with high mileage. By Columbus I had just bonked and had to take a few days off. Then I ran 4 low mileage weeks in advance of VCM, which wasn't what I wanted.
Most of the rest of the race was pretty much just hanging on. It was frustrating to run so slow again for the second half, but this year was for totally different reasons than the last couple of years, so it wasn't totally demoralizing. I stopped at 24 to take off my shoes (my feet hurt pretty bad for most of the second half, maybe because my socks were a bit thicker). It felt good to finish barefoot. I wasn't pleased with the effort overall, but a lot of factors affected the race and in the end it is what it is. I'm excited for a solid summer of training.
Splits:
5:35
11:04 (5:29)
16:36 (5:32)
21:57 (5:21)
27:35 (5:38)
33:19 (5:44)
39:04 (5:45)
44:59 (5:55)
56:36 (11:37)
62:29 (5:53)
68:25 (5:56)
74:22 (5:57)
--- HALF: 1:14:42 ---
86:18 (11:56)
92:30 (6:12)
98:35 (6:05)
1:44:26 (5:51)
1:50:33 (6:07)
1:56:47 (6:14)
2:03:03 (6:16)
2:08:57 (5:54)
2:15:16 (6:19)
2:35:17