Racing season has officially kicked off! First up for me was Leprechaun Chase 10k on March 12th. The weekend was a busy one for me, as we hosted packet pickup at my second job. The store had awesome sales for the day! Thanks to everyone that bought something.

Race morning, I had to reroute through downtown, as a stopped train was blocking the fastest path to the start of the race. No big deal, I left early enough that I wasn’t going to miss the start by any means. Nor was I going to let that give me any jitters. I parked my car in the lot of Anytime Fitness and started my walk over to find Heidi in the sea of green. I found Bobbi first and we posed for a prerace photo.

Then I checked my phone and saw that Heidi was near the 9:00 pace flag. So I made my way over.

While waiting for the start I had my prerace Honey Stingers and then I had a piece of Run Gum. I soon figured out that I had forgotten to charge up my X2s and would be running without music. I was a bit amped up from the Run Gum and I started the race very quickly. There’s a short out and back segment when you hit the 1 mile mark and I looked down and saw that my pace was around 7:50 for the first mile. I started to ease off and clocked 8:15 for mile 1. Way, way, way too fast for me, when I had 5 more miles to go. So as I headed on the course into Gray’s Lake, I concentrated on trying to maintain pace between 9:15-9:30. For the most part I was successful on hitting those paces. I even encouraged another runner not to quit when she was barely 3 miles into the race. She was aiming for a 1 hour finish time, as was I, so I chatted with her to get her breathing calmer. Turns out she hadn’t trained for this year’s race and she was trying to better last year’s time, which she trained for. She stuck with me just before the course hit the bridge at Gray’s Lake, and she yielded to walking. I always struggle going over the bridge at Gray’s Lake. I know that it is completely mental at this point.

My slowest mile came after the bridge and the second water stop. I clocked 10:05 for that mile. I knew I was getting close to the end as I had 1.2 miles left and picked it back up after the water stop. As I was getting near the 6 mile mark, Glen, a runner from various Strider groups, caught up to me and we chatted a bit. I told him that I was on pace for my 10k PR. I tried to hang with him, but he is just a bit faster than I am and I had very little left in the tank. I did get my PR. I knocked almost 7 minutes off of my 10k PR!

Overall it was an awesome race. A fairly flat, fast course. The weather wasn’t terrible, though it did start to rain during the after party. Plus, I ran the race with two of my best running friends!