Luke - 9

It was cold and rainy, and not many people showed up for the 6pm race. I recognized one person as the guy that won the Duck Dash, so I figured I could let him pull me along and I might have a shot at beating him if I ran an outstanding time. The race started by circling a park, then turned onto the bike path. I ran with Duck Dash Winner (DDW) and we talked slightly at the start. I was definitely much more well warmed up than last race, and had done enough strides to be ready for the first mile going fast. At the one mile mark the race did a 180 around a guy standing there reading our splits. He said 5:07 but I when I hit my watch it said 5:11. Either way, right where I wanted to be! DDW got serious after that and I could take our 1/4-mile splits because the bike path has them marked. I just kept up with him as he ran a 77, then another 77, and then he pulled away. I ran a 73 and he must have been about 5 seconds in front of me. My second mile was 5:12, right where I wanted to be, but maybe 8-10 seconds behind DDW. At that point I was in no-man's land, and just tried to push it and focus on DDW. At one point I was able to look behind me and see the third-place guy lingering about twenty seconds back and I figured we would probably finish in that order. Not much happened the rest of the race; I saw DDW in front of me and wasn't able to catch him, but I figured I would PR so I was pushing hard. Coming down the final stretch I could see the clock in the 16:teens and I kicked in for a 16:19 on my watch (16:20 on theirs). PR by fifteen seconds! After the race I thanked DDW for pulling me along to a PR and he congratulated me. He said he had found out about the race about 45 minutes before it started and he was "glad we didn't go out too fast" or he would have been hurting. His time was 15:52.

There was free beer at the awards ceremony and I got a medal for winning my age group (DDW is 30) and some bagels and cookies. DDW got a comped entry to the next race...I'm kinda glad I didn't get that because I'd like to focus on training instead of racing for a while; these past couple weeks have been pretty low-mileage. Gotta get into the triple digits where I belong!