This was a decent race. Not great, not bad, just decent. Overall, when you consider that I was nursing my achilles and had just come off a hilly half marathon four days before, I’m pretty content with my performance - especially considering that this was another hilly course.

Anyway, I showed up at the race course about 1:15 before the start. This is a habit that I’m really trying to get into, giving myself lots of time to rest, relax, and warm up. I met up with Alex, Ivi, and some other folk and we did a gentle 1.2 mile warmup jog at about a 10:00 pace. This was followed up by the standard Gazelle drill section, and its been a while since I did that! The rest of the time was spent chatting, keeping warm, and doing calf/itb stretches.

There were 7,000 people at the race, and I was a bit concerned about position - even so I lined up a little too far forward. We had what for me would have been a perfect position, but a lot fewer people filled out the space between us and the line as we thought, and we ended up moving forward about 20 feet just before the starting gun went off. That put me over the line in 183rd place.

For the first mile I tried to go out fairly hard, but at a maintainable pace. I looked down at the Forerunner once or twice but was just making sure that I wasn’t 6:something. I was fine, and ended up clocking a 7:37 for the first mile - gently uphill. The air was extremely dry, about 10% humidity, and my throat was rasping hard enough that I grabbed a water (without stopping) and threw it towards my mouth. A lot of it actually went in, which surprised me.

Mile two had us going up Guadalupe - the main drag next to campus - and over on 27th. It was uphill for most of the way, although not too bad, with a steep short downhill near the end. During this mile dmit came up behind me, and Dave (who not so long ago had some fairly serious hardware bolted in to his broken hip) came up on both of us like we were just out for a jog. dmit got away from me as I slowed to toss some more water at myself, but I kept him in sight. This mile was slightly faster at 7:25.

Mile three was harder. There was a long uphill, steeper than before. I was really beginning to worry about my ankle here and backed off a little, trying hard to run more on my toes and be safe. I started imagining all sorts of little twists and tweaks that I might be making and not knowing about, really losing the mental battle here. Normally I’d be charging up this hill, digging deep - exactly what I’m not supposed to be doing. There was a good amount of gentle downhill in the second half, but it still took me almost eight minutes (7:57) to complete.

Next came the long stretch down Red River. The first mile or so has some good hills as well, up and down but mostly up. For some reason I remembered this as being much more downhill than it actually was; this was where I started to suffer last year as well, come to think of it. I’m not enjoying myself at this point, although near the end I start thinking about accelerating up and picking off dmit, which made it a little better. Still, another slow mile at 7:53.

Mile five, the last mile, is the most interesting. The Red River portion is mostly downhill. A slew of one-mile-walkers join the fun, forcing all of the runners to move wide into the traffic lanes. About half a mile into it I’m only twenty feet or so from dmit as he makes the penultimate right turn onto 10th. After that turn, however, is by far the steepest hill of the course and I start losing some serious time. Again, I feel like I’m trying to prance my way up and its not making me happy. Its short, but my breathing is a pretty hard 2/2 by the end of it, flirting with worse than that.

The last quarter mile has us running North on Trinity, just as we started, making a loop back to the start line. There’s a short flat/uphill section, then perhaps 200m of downhill to the finish. Halfway through the uphill I see a woman come up behind me going for the pass. I kicked it down and said, “Hey, wanna race?” She grinned, and we book it up over the hill and down towards the end. I couldn’t quite keep up with her as she gently eases past me, but I’m closing rapidly on dmit. Can I pass him? Unfortunately (for me) he sees me out of the corner of his eye and kicks it up one final notch, staying ahead of me and crossing the finish line 0.1 before me. For the record he started about 5 seconds behind me, so he beat me fair and square both ways, even though I finished out the day with a nice 7:31 final mile.

My official time was 38:23 (7:41 pace), which was good enough for 343rd place and turned out to be 7:20 faster than last year’s time. I guess I should be happy with that, and I am - for the most part. I just think that I’m capable of running 7:30s at that distance, even on that course, if it wasn’t for my sore ankle. Ah, well. I guess I’ll just have to wait until next year to get another chance.

After the race was over I hung out around the finish line to try to see Tracy coming in - turns out that I did see her, but didn’t realize it, as she’d cunningly disguised herself by changing outfits. To her, and to everyone else who raced this weekend, congratulations - and I’ll catch you at the next one!

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