Wow! 5 minutes faster than last year's time. In warmups my legs felt dead and knowing I had not tapered the way I wanted to, I lowered my expectations for this race. When I started out with a 7:00 first mile, I started thinking I might be able to go 1:10:00. But, with mile 2 being 7:15, I figured I had come back to earth and I would just run the best I could and be happy with the results. After mile 3 the better runners had separated themselves from the field and I had nobody in front of me and no footsteps behind me, so it became a time trial. In that situation, I have a hard time pushing to my limits. After the turn around point the wind was at my back and I noticed I had gained some ground on a woman ahead of me. There was also a girl who caught me during mile 6. I knew this was good for me, to race somebody head to head. Mile 6 was 6:47 and I felt like I was floating over the ground - game back on! The young girl and I caught up with the woman ahead of us and the three of us duked it out until we got to the boardwalk. I managed to pull away from them and catch two more runners. Every split after the turn was sub 7:00 - I couldn't believe it. I kept wondering if 1:10:00 was possible. At the 9 mile mark a vol read the time, "1 hour 2 minutes 57 seconds." Do I have one more sub-7 in me? I no longer felt like I was gliding over the ground, but rather like I was carrying wet cement on my shoes, but I gutted out a 6:50 mile, came in under an hour 10 minutes, and beat last year's time by 5 minutes! A great race!

Nothing.

Walked, stretched, water, banana.


From a training standpoint, I should have incorporated more hill work, and tapered better. But, the weather and my schedule prevented me from doing that.


Cracked the top 30 - proud of that. Top 10 in my AG - happy about that, too, especially since 3 of top 4 runners were >40! Going to be tough moving up, #9 was over 1 min. ahead of me.