After a late night bartending and three sleepless hours on the couch I forced myself to get up and head out to the Pikes Peak Road Runners 10 miler, the third race in their winter series. I still didn't think I was ready for a race effort up here in the altitude, but I figured that a hard run while I was dead tired would be good training for the upcoming ultra season.
Weather was awful. The race was on a Town Lake like trail way up north, just above the Air Force academy. A fresh coat of snow had fallen on the front range, leaving a good three inches on top of the trail. It was just an out-and-back course, and runners had to fight an awful headwind on the way out.
I was severly underdressed, and I had to start slow to try to warm up. Hit the first mile in 8:10, freezing my ass off, slipping all over the place on the snow, I knew already it wasn't gonna be a good day.
I kept chugging along, fighting the wind and snow, continuing at just over an eight minute per mile pace. Hit the halfway point in 41:30.
Once I turned around and had the wind at my back, it was a different story. With the same effort my pace picked up dramatically. I was able to start passing quite a bit of the locals. Still hadn't kicked it all the way to race gear, but I was breathing pretty heavily those last few miles.
I hit the nine mile mark just as the clock passed seventy minutes, and decided to pick it up for one last mile. I nailed a 6:12 to end with a finishing time of 1:16:12. 25th place out of 93 finishers.
Pretty happy with the effort. It was a good tempo run, my first decent effort up here in Colorado. Averaged just over seven and a half minutes a mile, pretty good for having such a slow first half. But didn't give it my all, had to save something for tomorrow's attempt at Barr Camp...
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