2 mile warmup, Provo City Half Marathon in 1:15:40 (13th place), 1.3 mile cooldown. Got up at 4:15 AM, left to drive to Provo at 4:30, had to wait until 5:45 to get on a bus, but jogged around down there for about a mile. Waited for a portal potty for almost exactly 30 minutes at the start (seriously, what a mess... these guys need to fix this...), then jogged another mile before starting.
Race went off and I went out hard. I figured I could go sub-1:17 based on my 1:15:33 time last year with a ton of workouts under my belt, and with better baseline fitness this year, but almost no training in about 2 months. I figured I'd have some fun, so I went out in 5:30 and 5:32 for the quite downhill first 2. These didn't feel overly taxing, but my calves didn't feel fantastic based on my current poor fitness and I was nervous about a possible cramp. 3rd mile had quite a few rolls, isn't downhill overall, and is a bit deceiving, so that was a 5:50. 4th mile was back to 5:39. Mile 5 was a 5:45. At this point, my legs were feeling OK, but not great. Mile 6 was a 5:47, and 7 was a 5:46. At this point, I felt like I had a good rhythm going and was getting confident that I could hold it to the finish and somehow eke out a 1:14:xx, despite starting to feel kind of crappy. Mile 8 kept up this trend with a 5:45. However, once I turned out of the canyon, I got a blast of headwind and my pace dropped about 10s/mile for a 5:55 in mile 9. Mile 10, also 5:55, started to feel like quite a fight, and when I saw Spence waiting for the 5k start at the 10 mile mark, I commented that I was "bleeding all over the course at this point". At this point, with a big hill in mile 11, in addition to the wind, I just wanted to keep everything under 6:00, and barely continued that trend with a 5:59 for mile 11. Unfortunately, the mile 11 marker was way off (the markings on the ground were within .01 of my Garmin for everything up until the last one I had seen at 9, but mile 11 was 11.15 miles in on my Garmin). I started to realize that even a PR wasn't going to happen, since I was going to have to cover 13.25 miles, but I saw Dave Taylor up ahead and locked onto him, focused on passing him after losing our last 2 encounters by a small number of seconds (Running of the Leopards and Provo City 2013). I made a big push in mile 12 (5:47) and caught him at about 11.75. The marker was once again at 12.15 at my watch, and I didn't think I'd catch anyone else, so I made the mistake of backing off a little bit in the 13th mile (5:55). By the time I hit 13 miles, I realized that the distance actually was correct, and the 11 and 12 mile markers had just been in the wrong spot, but at this point it was too late to really kick in to a PR and I finished up the last .1 in 35 seconds to hit a 1:15:40, 7 seconds off of last year's time and my PR. Of course, I also just narrowly missed nipping another guy, whom I caught at about mile 13 and then lost in the kick down the stretch (I had no sprint in me today). Overall, I consider this race to be quite successful given how little I've done lately, but I wish I had found another 8 seconds to nab a PR.
Post race, legs were really beat, and I know that even if I had PRd, I was in better shape at last year's race, when I felt completely fine and capable of more miles in the 5:40s after the finish. Last year, I went out conservatively and split my fastest miles at the end of the race. This year, I went out hard, faded, and hung on for a similar time. I'd rather race like last year's when possible, but it's fun to sometimes push a bit too hard and really test my mettle over the finishing miles.
My girlfriend Daria just flew into town for a long weekend, so I'll take a few days off to recover in order to avoid a massive injury like what I got after last year's race, and then I'll hopefully be able to finally hit some consistency with my training again for the first time in 2 months.
Oh, and great job to everyone that ran fast times here today. This is really not the fast course that people make it out to be. If you plug it into Daniels, it's nearly a minute slower than a pancake flat course at sea level (a little over 2 minutes gained from the net downhill, but 3 minutes lost from the altitude), which means that guys like Fritz and Nate had some ridiculous monster runs today. There's debate among some Utah runners over how much altitude affects longer aerobic performances, but I can say that my experience very closely matches the Daniels tables I use to calculate my conversions, well within a typical day-to-day performance margin. For example, a tempo / half marathon pace effort on identical terrain, ie on top of the line $10k treadmills, at sea level is typically 14 seconds per mile faster for in MN than in Utah, converting to almost exactly 3 minutes in a half marathon. However, 5k races for me are run in a time different by only 5 seconds per mile, while my easy runs with identical effort are the better part of a minute faster at sea level. The easier you're going, the more the altitude slows you down. People don't always want to believe it, but running a monster time here would indicate even more ridiculous fitness on a half marathon course along the lines of that found in the Dubai Marathon. Of course, there are very few sea level courses that are legitimately pancake flat, and even fewer that are as straight as Provo City, so a "fast" sea level course may actually be closer to comparable, but a few really fast, but totally fair, courses could yield 1:06s for someone like Fritz, and you can take that to the bank.
Edit: To give additional backup to my last paragraph, I've plotted out Daniels' calculated effects of 5000' of altitude, on various distances from 1 mile to 50 miles, for racers that could, in a maximum effort, achieve 6:00 pace at each of the race distances. The x-axis is the distance of the race in miles, while the y-axis is the number of additional seconds required, per mile, to complete the race at 5000' instead of at sea level. The result we see is interesting. Obviously, the longer the race, the more aerobic the effort, and the more the athlete depends on oxygen levels. This is why sprinters and jumpers can fare better at altitude, while distance runners fare worse. This part is not surprising. What is surprising is that the curve, if plotted to longer distances, reveals an oblique rather than a horizontal asymptote. Of course, this is purely hypothetical, as it is likely impossible to be properly trained to race a distance of 100 miles. Beyond 50 miles, aerobic potential becomes less important in the face of muscle cramps, nutritional issues, etc.
Please note that this relationship assumes that the athlete is completely acclimated to 5000'. If the athlete is not acclimated, the results will be far worse than what I've indicated.
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