I realized that I neglected to post a race report for the Second Empire 5K last Sunday.  Kind of ironic since it turned out to be a PR beating my old record by over a minute.  I setup a new playlist on my Ipod for this race and made sure to not bring my heart rate monitor and only run by how I felt.  A lot of the time I’ll be a little too reliant on the monitor to control my pace rather than pushing myself to a better time.

I was suspicious of how well I’d do on this race because the day before was a NC State football game where I went out and tailgated plus went out after and had a bit too much to drink.  I woke up feeling ok but there’s usually not a get out of jail free card.  I also ended up getting out to the race course late after waiting for Charlie to come over since he was going to run this race with me.  The after effects of the day before were a lot more prevalent on his end.

I lined up for the run and it took me 14 seconds to cross the start/finish line at the beginning.  Usually that doesnt matter but turned out to be significant for this race.  I headed out pretty quickly pounding out to Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising which was the soundtrack of the Carolina Hurricanes cup run.  I knew I was going fast but wanted to push things and felt really good.  With AC/DC in my ears I came back through the crowd for the halfway mark still passing people with no one passing me.  My first mile split according to the Nike+ announcement was under 7 minutes.  At about the two mile mark I started to feel the effort catching up to me and knew I needed to set a pace and stick with it.  Luckily I was right behind a runner who was cruising at a comfortable pace so I settled in behind him for about half a mile.  Then when he started breaking down I went around him and started to push things to the end.  I caught quite a few more runners and looked back to see some people closing on my with their finishing kicks now that the finish line was close.  I broke out a sprint and crossed the line with a pretty big gap in front and behind me.

My finishing time was 22:07 which beats my previous PR by exactly one minute.  It turns out that i finished 120 out of 464.  I missed breaking the top 100 by 4o seconds.  Take away that 14 seconds from the beginning and it becomes 26 seconds.  I think I had 26 seconds left in the tank which is disappointing.  At least I think I did based on how I felt at the finish and my kick length.  I guess I’m starting to get to the point where lining up in the front of the race is starting to matter.  Not for wins but at least for personal goals.

Here’s hoping I can turn in another PR in Austin this weekend for the Livestrong Challenge 5K.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 8th, 2007 at 4:07 pm and is filed under Running. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.