Notes
CPC 2019! Whoo! Great race, mind definitely unbound compared to last year. Had an idea after Wednesday night's workout that I must be in pretty good shape, and that running 5:30 pace should be possible, but didn't reallllly have that as a goal... honestly would have been happy with anything faster than last year and if I had a goal pace it would have been 5:35. Weather was ideal (high 30s / low 40s, no wind really). Figured that since Paul & Jarrett were in similar shape anyways, the best & funnest way to run this would be to just roll with them whether it was fast or slow and not worry much about a specific pace.
Hung back a little bit at the start and gradually rolled back up on Paul & Jarrett a little after the mile mark, just wanted to make sure I didn't go sprinting out. The three of us ran as a pack from there, caught up to Eric Ashton and he joined with us as well around 2 miles maybe. Checked in with myself the first mile and felt very relaxed, told myself just to cruise and re-evaluate at 5k. Still felt really relaxed a few miles later, it felt like Paul was doing a lot of the "leading" so I tried to set the pace for a bit between 4 & 5 maybe, but we were all running as a close pack which was pretty fun and reassuring. My legs & lungs both felt GREAT, really felt like I was cruising at low 5:30s, so I made a plan with myself to try and go hard the last 5k. Picked it up a lot as soon as we hit the 10k timing mat, I almost felt silly at the moment but in reality it wasn't that big an increase... felt really smooth for maybe a mile of that, and mentally I knew that there really wasn't much race left, but the last two miles were tough! My legs finally started to fatigue and it was a big effort to stay engaged and pushing. I could hear Jarrett close behind me, had a pretty fun "duel" with him as I would surge when I heard him get closer, but then inevitably settle back... unfortunately I don't think I was ever too confident I was going to hold him off, but I figured I could use the motivation to keep the pace up over the final miles. He finally caught me around mile 8, and I fell off pretty quickly from there - more a case of me slowing down once I'd lost the lead then him speeding up. Lost ~10 seconds over the last mile but did close pretty hard in the final .3 - lots of turns!
A great race, conditions were much nicer than last year I think but still - a 75s PR and a performance that far exceeded my expectations. If I can keep things rolling as I did last year, I should be able to drop PRs all spring. incidentally, this was a faster pace than any of my previous best road 10ks, and FWIW if the last 5k was 16:51, that's only 12s slower than my best road 5k... Happy with the way I raced, I went in without too many expectations and just raced how I felt, a similar attitude to how I approached NB last year (maybe I was a little less aggressive today). Allowed myself to go a bit faster than I planned to run with the group, and then to LIR really early in the race without worrying about whether I would die or not. Hopefully can take the same approach to the race next week and try to hang with the guys, we'll see!
Woke up 2.5 hours before the race and had black coffee + a bagel with PB and another half bagel, no issues there.