Started good; started strong. Felt like I could have gone faster but I held myself back wanting to be consistent throughout. By mile 2, I could feel my legs getting heavy; lactic acid was starting to accumulate. Looking at my Garmim, I noticed I was "surging," that is, I was running at 7:10 pace and then would fall back to 7:40 and say, "Whoops, gotta pick it up again." I found myself settling into a slower pace and had to convince my body that I could faster. This continued through the end of the race.

The people on the run were great. I get some good motivation by passing those who have gone out too fast. Not a "hey, I'm better than you" motivation but just a reaffirmation that I'm running my race. The last three-quarters of a mile or so, I ran with a woman who I had been passed by and passing all race. She ran on my shoulder and we talked a little bit about the pace, where she was going to finish among women, etc. Toward the end, I picked up the pace and called to her to stay with me. She ended up fifth or sixth overall for the women. I was probably somewhere in the 50-75 range. I only know that because there were T-shirts for the first 50 male and first 50 female finishers and I missed out on a T-shirt.

I had plenty in the tank to fend off a last minute surge by someone 100m from the line, which leads me to believe that I could have and should have run a bit harder. I was more after a LT threshold HR or LT pace for training purposes and so I was thinking and hedging my bets some. I should have taken off a bit faster and harder and just laid it all on the course.



The big thing I would do differently is just race and not analyze everything as I raced. I can do the analysis when I get done.

I would also do some more warm-ups, to include 3-5 min. at race pace just to wake everything up.

Stood around and drank water. My stomach was a little topsy-turvy from the Propel pre-race. More because I had guzzled it than anything. Therefore, I drank only water. Found some other people from my company and battalion and talked with them. We took a group photo of folks from our company who finished. Then my partner and I biked 3/4 of a mile back to our hooches for recovery.


I'm at the beginning of a focused training program for tris and feel like my running plan is right on track, so far. Today reinforced that. Given some more time to adapt, improve, and lose weight, I can see my times dropping significantly.


First time running in a forward area so I don't know what to expect. There wasn't anything more that I could ask for, given the location.