My first race in a couple months went well. I did a couple miles of warmup, the Winter Series 5k in 17:02, a couple miles of cooldown. I went out in 5:32 and felt really comfortable, not to mention that the weather was uncharacteristically good, so I figured I had a shot at sub-17. Not wanting to blow up (I'm bad at gauging 5ks, and just yesterday thought that anything under 17:20 probably wouldn't happen), I decided to conservatively increase the pace and just sneak under the mark. I did the 2nd mile in 5:27, and then the 3rd mile in 5:23. Unfortunately I wasn't planning on 3.13 (I guess I ran the tangents pretty poorly), so my last .13 at 4:59 pace couldn't quite get me there and I ended up at 17:01.6. Oh well. This is still my fastest non-aided 5k in Utah (previous was 17:04 in 2009, on a point-to-point course that was net uphill by a measly 5 feet) and my overall 3rd fastest 5k ever (16:34 PR is from my win in the 5k at the National Beer Pong Championships in 2009, down at sea level, and my 16:44 at Running of the Leopards last year was obviously aided).
Race wise, I went out in what must have been about 30th place. I stuck about there until shortly before a mile, when I started passing people. I couldn't get a sense of pace for about the first .5 miles, but right around when Steve Ashbaker pulled up to me at a half mile, I started being able to roll, so I took off from him. I passed another 5 or so guys before the turnaround, and after the turnaround, I saw Sasha pretty far off in the distance. It took me until 2.3 to catch him, but I did, and then started to focus on Walter. I caught him around 2.7 or 2.8, and then keyed off closing the gap on Benjamin Pachev from there until the finish (closed on him, but he was too far and still got me by 10 seconds), while fighting off Dennis Simonaitis - who had been running with Walter and then went with me -over the last couple hundred meters. I don't normally feel like having others in the race affects how I perform all that much, unless I'm just sandbagging for an easy win, but negative splitting was a lot easier today when I had other runners in front of me that I knew I could reel in.
Congrats to Josh E for running nearly 2 minutes faster than last year (and massively leapfrogging me), Scott Keate for an absolutely dominating masters performance (yeah, yeah, he's 39, but he turns 40 this year and counts as masters in the circuit), and Riley for beating a solid course record. Getting 17th with a 17:02 this year, compared to 12th with a 17:33 last year, indicates that there are a lot of people who are rounding into monster shape for their upcoming early-mid Spring races, so I'm excited to see everyone's results this year.
Noon: Clean air rally. Some of the speakers were good, but overall it was less effective than it could have been.
PM: Ski day #26 of the season.
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