Today I had the pleasure of racing in my first ever true running race since my days of freshman high school track. The day brought absolute PERFECT conditions! The temperature when the gun went off was just below 50 degrees and the winds were light and variable.
Now I must confess, I was not "trained" for this race. I've been schooling pretty hard as of late, and would estimate in the last month that I have run a total of 50-60 miles. I ran 10 miles once about 2 weeks ago. Most the of runs I have gone on have been shorter, faster, "build my speed" kinds of runs. With that in mind, I set my goal to run 15k in under one hour (6:20/mile pace).
I was fortunate to be placed in the "A" corral, which was in the front of the pack. The gun went off and the elite took off like bats out of hell. It's incredible how fast some of those runners are, men and women alike! The first place male finished in a blazing time of 48:11, and the first female finished in 53:11 (14th overall!).
My strategy was to start out slow, maybe go out on 6:30's or something right around there and then build my tempo through the race. This strategy is quite contrary to my splits posted below :)
The gun went off and I felt surprisingly good for having just been standing in place for 15 minutes (they loaded us in the starting chute really early). Luckily for me, there were clocks at every mile marker, which allowed me to confirm my pace with my own watch. I reached mile one, look at the clock which read 5:50. My watch said the same thing. WAY too fast. Well, I felt good so I just went with it.
5k rolled around at 18:34, I had slowed slightly from my first mile, but was still averaging 5:58 pace. It was unfortunate that I fell into a gap between two groups. The one in front of me was running just slightly faster than I was comfortable pushing, so I did most of the work through the first 10k on my own. I rolled through 10k at 38:03, slowing my pace a bit more from the first 5k, I was averaging 6:07/mile through 6.2 miles. At this point I started hurting pretty bad. My legs started feeling heavy and I was cramping a bit in my lower back and abs. I ran with several different guys for brief periods, but they eventually picked up the pace and left me in the dust.
Running up the finishing chute, my watch was approaching 58 minutes, and my final time ended up being 58:01 (6:14/mile). I was pretty happy with my effort, finishing well under an hour and running quite a bit faster than I thought I was capable of at this point and with that amount of previous running. My placing was as follows:
Age Group (20-24): 8th / 340
Overall: 57th / 13,430
Overall, I felt this was an awesome race. It was very well organized, the volunteers and Chicago Police did an outstanding job catering to the athletes every needs. I always feel so grateful for the people behind the scenes who make events like this happen- truly amazing!
Post-race I met up with a friend from school, Dave, and his fiance Meredith. Both of them also ran the 15k and had excellent races as well! We enjoyed the Ghirardelli Chocolate fondu and hot chocolate tent where we were spoiled with all kinds of chocolate goodies. Will definitely be racing in this event again next year, and would highly recommend it for anyone looking to run/walk a 15k or 5k in November!
I'm off to Madison to spend some quality time with my mother and father, and may even try and stir up some trouble with running extraordinaire, Travis "T-pain" Pernsteiner. It should be noted that "T-pain" is not a facetious nickname, but "T-pain" is derived from the fact that when we run together he put the "pain" on me. Time to catch a train!
Cheers
Thanks for giving a shout-out to the coordinators, that never happens!
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