Sorry for the delay in getting this race report up. It's been a busy Easter weekend.
This was a great race for me. I really liked the new course and thought it had a good mix of hills, downhills and flat parts. I met Allie at her house bright and early (5:30 am) and we drove up to the U. We stayed inside the math building where James works. It was nice to be inside where it was warm. Allie and I drew up a detailed race plan on one of the white boards. This plan included a ghost, a hurdle, a muppet (Oscar the Grouch), a mushroom from Super Mario and a neighbor lady spraying us down with a water house. Overall, I felt like this was a solid plan and I was going to stick to it! :P
The first few miles felt nice and comfortable. There were a couple steep hills and one long gradual one. Running down Memory Grove was fun. At mile 5, Allie started to pull away from me and I was ok with that. I knew if I pushed it too hard at that point I would be dying at the end. I watched her catch up with the girl in first place and I did a "Go Allie" fist pump. I could tell that the second place girl wasn't too far ahead of me around mile 9 and I tried my hardest to catch her. At mile 12, there was only a 15 second gap between us. I pushed that last mile but so did she. She was a tough runner! She finished 15 second ahead of me so we were both running the same pace at the end. Allie finished in 1st about 45 seconds in front of me and I was super happy for her! She is an awesome runner. My final time was 1:22:09. This is a PR for me by about 1.5 minutes! I felt pretty strong throughout the entire race. I'm excited to see if I can break that 1:20 milestone by the end of the summer.
Here are my splits. (My Garmin was measuring a little short compared to the course markers? So I'm not sure how accurate they are): 6:18, 6:36, 5:48, 5:48, 5:39 (probably not), 6:20, 6:03, 6:30, 6:15, 6:21, 6:03, 6:19, 6:06. (6:10 AP)
Congrats to Allie, Emma, Fritz and all the other amazing runners!
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