Notes
Not my best race and slower than last year's time by 70 secs. I sometimes don't get it but with this race I know exactly what I did wrong. I started way too fast too soon. It was a very small race, maybe 50-60 participants and when the race started it seemed like everyone took off as fast as they could. I tried to hold back and run my own race but when you're already in 4th from last place right from the start, it's hard too hold back. By 1/2 mile, I realized I still was averaging around an 8 min pace and slowed down some but it was already too late. By the time I got to the top of the first hill, my HR spiked to 186 bpm which based on the 209 - (age x 0.7) formula is my max HR.
It has never gone above 182 in any of my training runs, not even during very hard speed workouts so when the dizziness and the feeling that I was about to pass out came, I knew I better slow it down and walk to recover. It took me a good half mile to recover. At that point, I just told myself to forget about trying to PR and instead fully recover then refocus and use this as a training run and go for negative splits the last 5K so that's what I did. Mile splits were 9:25, 12:23, 11:28, 11:13, 10:50.