Saturday, June 23, 2012

8k race

I had a race last night. Fridays nights are not my favourites for races because of work. I am lucky that I only work a half day on Fridays, but I ended up doing some errands in the afternoon and ended up feeling a little rushed. Plus timing when to eat is kind of hard. This race was hooked up with a 1500m track race afterwards, which I ended up staying for, because a local-ish guy was trying to meet the Canadian standard in it.

So firstly the track people? SO FAST. The race with they guy going for the standard was like 3 minutes 30-someodd seconds for 1500 metres. I'm pretty sure I couldn't run at that speed for one lap even if you paid me. He ended up missing the standard by about 2 seconds which was obviously disappointing, but it was so cool to watch. It's so different watching the races live compared to on TV. They seem to go so much faster when watching live.

The only the I didn't like about staying that long is that I didn't really have a dinner. I ate around 3:30 pm - 4pm, and had some watermelon and a Clif bar, but not much else until I got home at around...11 or so? So next time, maybe more food would be in order.

Anyway back to the race. The weather was better than it had been in previous years. We had a mini heat wave earlier in the week, and I was a little concerned that it would extend to Friday, but it ended up breaking on Thursday night. It was still a bit hot, but less humid than it was earlier in the week, and less humid than it had been in the past years for the race. I find 8k races hard in that I kind of have to think about it as a short 10k race or a long 5k race. So pacing was a little bit of an issue. Ended up finished at 39:37, which was ok. About 3 minutes faster than the last time I ran this race, so that's something. Ended up 2nd in my age group, which was also pretty sweet.

I get a little bit of a break for a couple weeks now, and not have such intense training for the next couple of weeks, which I'm kind of looking forward too. Give me time to recharge a little and then get back into training for the next race.