Notes
My plan was to go out around 7:20 the first few miles and then see if I could dip lower on the second half.
I got out a bit faster than I wanted to on the first mile. I've started using the lap pace screen on the Garmin when I am running the tempo runs and intervals where I'm trying to hit a certain pace. It kept showing about a 7:15-7:16 lap pace so wasn't expecting a 7:11 first mile.
The second mile I got it back on my 7:20 target and planned to keep that pace. I felt a bit dehydrated this morning so I took the water on the 3rd mile and felt I lost a few seconds with the water and the lap pace jumped a bit. It would have been close to 7:20 but the 3rd mile ran long. Same thing happened on mile 4. Had the 7:20 lap pace going but it ended up being 1.01 miles.
I then got it going a little faster on the 5th mile. There wasn't a lot of passing going on along the Greenway but I found myself passing a couple runners on the 5th mile as I got going just under 7:15. At the end of the 5th mile, I felt a bit of adrenaline that increased the pace a bit and lap pace was showing around 7:05.
Ran hard towards the end but I could see I was just going to miss sub 45:00. But I was finishing hard.
A pretty good last 2.2 miles. But I should have started the sprint a little earlier and I could have been under 45. As usual, got sick after crossing the finish line. But that's better than before the finish line like at Hill Yeah!
The cool down was 18 holes of golf at Bluegrass CC. I was pretty tired at the end of golfing and spent Saturday night resting.
I saw more than 3 50+ year olds ahead of me on the list, so figured I was just an age group finisher. But some of those 50+ year olds were finishers in the regular Masters division, which put me in 3rd place for Grand Masters. Never expected to place top 3 in the Grand Masters with over 600 participants.