Notes
Smashed my PB by 2:50 (set last year at this race), so a great result.
At the start I immediately found myself in a group with some of the people I'd been just ahead of in the 5K last week. Even though they were going faster than I had planned, and I thought I would detonate in the final lap, I decided to hang with them as long as possible and see what happened. The pace felt easy aerobically, but I could tell my legs were a bit tired (relatively high mileage week, and relatively lots of racing recently). We bounced around a bit, I went ahead for a while, then got caught by the remnants of the group going down the hill on the second lap. During the long climb on the second lap it thinned to just me and one other guy, and we stayed together until the climb on the final lap. At that point I was feeling tired but not terrible, and so when I took the lead for a bit I pushed and just kept going. It actually felt easier to be running faster, and so I concentrated on trying to catch the next group (about 100m away). I made some progress, but running sub-6-minute pace up the hill started to make me go too anaerobic, so I backed off and settled for maintaining my position. But I kept running strongly and saw the clock at 1:21:30 as I came into the car park for the final sprint.
While running I didn't check the pace on my watch at all, after the initial break from the start. I knew that 6:15 pace for one 4.5 mile lap was ~28:30, and so it was great to see dead on that for both the first two laps. It definitely helped to be running with others most of the time, lets you switch off for short periods of time and conserve mental energy.
Was very surprised that I didn't die in the final lap, it actually felt a lot easier than last year, hard but completely manageable; makes we wonder if there wasn't another minute to be taken off if I'd pushed a bit more. It's also interesting that this is /exactly/ in line with McMillan's prediction from last week's 17:38 5K, so it shows my endurance is not too bad, despite the lack of long runs this year.
New unofficial 10 mile PB as well: 1:02:12.