I made my goal of a sub 2:00, but I think I could have done it less painfully.

I had to maintain at least a 9:07/mi for the whole 13.1 miles to meet the sub 2-hrs which in itself was a task for me.

We properly positioned ourselves in the 9-min corral, but ended up being behind the 10 and 11 min milers. Started with c2fd, his training partner, max, HookedOnTri, evrunning, and kgart. It was tough winding through all the people at the start and by the time we reached Mile 1, we took 9:30 to get there. SHIT. Already 27 seconds behind goal pace. Keeping 9:07 was hard enough, now I had to make up that time!

Mike (HookedOnTri) who also had the same goal wanted to stay with me, so we decided to try to start playing catch up with the clock to Mile 2, still having to weave through people. We did the second mile in 8:34, by then we were 18:04, now 10 seconds ahead of goal time. Everyone else we were with decided to just hang back for the time being...We still had to wind around other people before I felt comfy running, but we had caught up to our time.

From then on we stayed ahead of our goal pace by a few seconds on the subsequent miles up til about mile 11. I got a little hot running, the forecasted weather for today was better than expected - actual winds weren't as bad as forecasted.

We did mostly sub 9s up til mile 9, and I could feel it! By mile 6 I was hurting, and by mile 8 I had to will myself to finish with 5+ miles to go...it wasn't about running anymore but willing myself to the end. c2fd and his partner picked up their pace and whizzed past us at mile 6... Mike was just plugging along and cracking jokes and chatting with the nice people who were out in the cold cheering everyone on! I had a hard time catching my breath to breathe comfortably early on and I knew that if I slowed I would catch my breath and probably run better, but THAT CLOCK!! I couldn't spare 1 SECOND!

By the time we passed the 10-mile mark and I felt comfortably ahead of schedule, I told Mike that I wanted to take 11 and 12 easy and then GO! the last 1.1 miles. He said ok! I wanted to do something like 9:30's to recoup, came close to it (9:19 / 9:25). Tried to pick up the last mile but it was killing me. I wanted Mike to go without me because I could tell he had it in him to pick it up over the last mile or so...so he went!

SPLITS
1 9:30
2 8:34
3 8:48
4 8:55
5 8:51
6 9:01
7 8:40
8 9:05
9 9:09
10 8:40
11 9:19
12 9:25
13.1 10:15



Heart rate train! I know I was red-lining it over the half the race - I also have a feeling that if I'd slowed down to a more comfortable heart rate in the middle of the race, I'd have been able to finish stronger!

Had fun meeting everyone!