Gotta hurt a little bit (Race Report)

Last weekend was the final of the puma series, the 15k. I had felt good all week, had a couple of really good speed sessions and I should have know I was going to need to recover some where in there. I went for an easy run on Friday and Saturday am I could start to feel the recovering process. My legs were flat. Which is good, it means I really maximized my speed training. My goal for the 15 was to hold my goal half marathon pace, and not go totally bananas, I have become pretty good at maintaining even pace and it make for a much more interesting and calculated race. I guess its a good bad thing with the Assinaboine park course is that its 5 k loops. Good its easy to time your laps and stay consistent, bad it can be a little annoying mentally especially on the 2nd lap.

I arrived early, completed standard race warm. I could still feel I was not fully recovered, but the nice thing about racing is the atmosphere covers up some of that weakness. The gun went off and I settled into a pace quickly. I could tell I was going to have no problem worrying about going out fast. The first lap felt ok I had a split of a high 20 I was happy with that. Going into the second lap was tough knowing I wasn't even half done. But I was still hitting my mile targets. I used others in the race to block some of the wind and really strategies my race slowing down an speeding up but still maintained goal pace. The third lap was just much easier mentally knowing that the finish is coming I was able to just tune out and finish up what needed to be done. Overall I didn't think I was going to be as consistent ant as I was (maybe varied 5-10 sec per lap) and I was happy with that considering that I started out fatigued. The total time was 1:03:48.