I positioned myself in the front 1/3 of the pack which I don't normally do (I'm more a BOP), but I knew there were a lot of walkers in this race and didn't want to get caught behind them. Turned out I was pretty much in the right spot. There was a little congestion at the beginning as everyone squashed together to run under the timing sensors, but once I got through that it opened up nicely. The only slowdown was about 1/2 mile in when all the middle school kids who had lined up at the front started to slow down. I worked my way around them and just kept going. The course has a few small hills that didn't really give me any trouble, and one larger hill at about the 1.5 mile mark that had me breathing a little harder, but I shortened my stride some and kept going. I kind of had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to try to set a PR, but I wasn't focused on it during the race. I just wanted to push it and see how well I could do. This was my first 5k since last November and I was curious to see how much, or if, I had improved over the winter. One thing I know for sure - running on the TM has definitely helped me with pacing. I had very even splits throughout the race and even though I missed a PR (by 16 seconds!), I'm very happy with the race I ran.

Nothing - it was a good race for me.