Notes
Really happy with a 16ish second 8K PR, beating a time from college from when I was in much better shape. I am a much better runner mentally these days.
Felt great on my 2 mile warm up around this arboretum. Tyson brought me a Weiland racing singlet and switched my bib from my singlet to that one while I was finishing up my warm up. While I was doing high knees I felt a pop in my hip flexor that actually hurt a little bit, but I didn't want to acknowledge it because I didn't want to psych myself out. Thankfully it ended up being fine.
They stagger starts and I was in a sub 6 group with about 10 guys and like 6 of us wanted to go out right at 6:00 flat. 3 guys went out much faster and I ran in the back of the group of 6 until like .75 because it felt like we had slowed to 6:05 pace or so. So from there I went to the front to make sure we stayed on the pace. Watch said first mile in 5:57, I think we crossed the mat closer to 6 flat. I'll have to double check later.
So from when I went to the front of our group until about 2.5 miles it was just me and one dude (Mitch) out front of our group. I think we must have broke the group up a bit, because from like 1.5-2.5 I really was only aware of one guy behind us. Around 3 miles he started pulling away from me and the guy hanging with us went with him. I was worried I was slowing down, but it turns out they just put in a surge. Hit 3 miles all alone and was a bit annoyed I missed my split.
Mile 4 was rough. There are a few rolling hills that weren't too bad, but the main suckage was from running into the 15mph-ish headwind over the bridge. Definitely didn't remember that from the first lap. It started to hurt a bit this mile and this is where some of the self doubt crept in of if I was going to be able to hold the pace and finish it out. Thankfully we were passing a lot of people that started after us and were still on their first loop, so I didn't feel all that alone. Probably lost 5 seconds to the wind and 5 seconds to feeling sorry for myself on this mile. Ended up splitting about 6:02 which isn't ideal, but I knew if I could pull it back a little bit I could still run a decent time.
Final .94 sucked, but also went by faster than I thought it would. I just focused on keeping the legs moving. Happy I was able to pull it back down to 5:50ish pace for that section.
Overall I am pretty happy. Its nice to see the training paying off. I wish I could have hung tougher the 4th mile but at least I know exactly where I need to improve. Great Wieland Racing debut!