A little jogging before the start, then Drop 13 Half Marathon win in 1:10:40. This course is very aided. I went out very easily in 5:03, and no-one was within 30-40 seconds, so I backed off and settled into a mid-5:20s average. I'm not sure what to say about this race. I really didn't feel like I cared much once I knew it would be an easy win. Time trialing seemed irrelevant, as the time is obviously not something I could run on a fair course, and winning wasn't going to be too hard, so I just settled into 90-95% effort. Around mile 7, I started to feel a hot spot under my right foot, which got a lot worse over the last 6, but never slowed me down. At mile 9-ish, the screaming downhill after the Stairs plant really hurt my quads, but they recovered once it got back to a 4% grade. At mile 10, the cop escort slowed until he was alongside me and told me that I had a 5 minute gap on 2nd place. I debated just backing off to avoid injury and speed the process of recovery, but figured I'd keep the effort consistent, as I was on track for sub-1:11, which sounded awesome. Mile 12 was very annoying, as I had to run down a 2-flight set of stairs to get onto a bike path, which broke up the rhythm. If I'm not mistaken, I was supposed to join the bike path 20 feet further along on the other side of the road, but the volunteers seemed adamant that I had to go down the stairs, so I did. I realized I'd have to work a bit over the last mile to get under 1:11, so I pushed the 13th mile. When the course flattened out for the last mile (less than .1% downhill, so very nearly flat), I kept the pace in the low 5:40s, so that was good. All that said, I'm pretty sure that the cops at the last turn sent me into the wrong lane, as the last 1.1 ended up being only 1.05, and the markers, while slightly variable when meeting up with aid stations in the canyon, were previously quite accurate, at least on average. So yeah, I had 13.05 in 1:10:39 (granted, I did briefly lose signal after going under the bridge in mile 12, so that's probably part of it), and they had me as 13.1 in 1:10:40. Either way, I'd have been in the high 1:10s, with a slight negative split, so I don't really care.
In terms of my time, I calculated that a 1:09-mid/high (a little under a minute faster) would've been equivalent to my Provo City half time, aerobically. The difference here is the need to have the ability to handle all of the pounding, so I figured that an equal pain effort would probably be slightly slower than the equivalent time. My quads/calves held up remarkably well, but I have a massive blister on the bottom of my right foot, and one of my left toenails has blood coming out of it, so my feet didn't take it so well. With all this in mind, I think a full on honest effort could've been as fast as 1:08-high, but I'd have been significantly increasing my chance of injury by doing so, so I'm glad that I ran as I did. In the end, I won by 8 minutes in a field with just shy of 1000 registered (maybe only 600 actually running, somehow), so that seems pretty solid to me.
It'll be interesting to see how my recovery goes. I'm a bit more sore than after, say, Provo City, but not by much, other than the mangled feet. In any case, I'd say that the overall takeaway is that I'm happy with how I ran today.
Oh, and also, major shoutout to my girlfriend Daria for getting up at 4:15 to drive me to a 4:50am bus pickup, and being one of only a few spectators around when I finished. She's pretty awesome.
Leopard print paid off today:
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