1st Race Back

            With the Irish Jig next weekend, I decided to head over to Jerome’s home town and run a little tune up at the Leprechaun Loop 5k. Racing longer distance races requires a completely different mindset and pain tolerance than racing 5k. My fall racing schedule consisted of 3 half marathons, a marathon, and 8k so I really wanted to race a shorter distance to knock a little rust off. As Jerome and I were driving to Port Huron, Jerome went on to tell me that Port Huron had gotten 4-5 inches of snow. I honestly didn’t really believe him, but sure enough, we arrived at his mom’s house with snow all around.

The next morning we viewed the course which was simply an out and back that was primarily run on the “board walk” (essentially a sidewalk that’s twice as wide as a normal sidewalk). Jerome and I warmed up on the course to see what the conditions would be like and the boardwalk was plowed, but it was covered in ice. Being as I took a spill on a morning run earlier in the week and I already had a sore knee, I was less than thrilled and contemplated not running the race. I really didn’t know much about the competition other than there was a 1:49 800 runner in the field. The first ¾ mile was on street and sidewalk where I thought I’d be able to open up my stride and really try to run fast. I took the first mile out pretty hard with a couple guys running for the Elite Feet Team. After about 600 meters I took the lead completely and came through the mile in 4:49. The last ¼ mile of the first mile was extremely slow. To put it in perspective, Jerome was running the 10k and he was running 4:57 pace at the ¾ mile mark, but once he hit the snow and then boardwalk, he ended up hitting the mile in 5:10. I’m not sure what type of pace I was running the first ¾ miles in, but I would guess somewhere around 4:40? The second mile was a 5:22 and I really was just trying to stay upright while maintaining a lead. I almost took a digger shortly after the turn around. The race was simply wild after the turnaround. While the icy boardwalk made it challenging to run, the race did have a couple hundred people in it and everyone was looking down and watching their footing. Needless to say, that made coming back against traffic in the opposite direction very interesting. Fortunately, major collisions were avoided, but I definitely had a lot of stop and go running. Coming off the boardwalk, the guy in second place was making a surge and I believe he caught me and was right on my heels. At that point in the race, I was pretty tired and completely out of rhythm so I just focused on reestablishing the pace and was able to hold him off. I believe my last mile split was a 5:10. While I was a little down that this mile wasn’t a little faster, I do have to keep reminding myself that there were a few sections on it where I essentially had to slow down to near stops to avoid collisions. I think my final time was around 16:01, but the race was good tune up for me. It really makes you appreciate how great of a job the people running the Playmakers races do. This race was definitely memorable and actually ended up being a lot of fun. The pub crawl afterwards was a pretty good cap to the weekend and the mental break was definitely needed. All in all, it was a pretty fun weekend.