Sunday, September 20, 2009

Its Getting Closer!

This week's running went great with the Harvest Stompede yesterday ending with a new best time. I was out of town (yet again) for work, but kept up with running although I did run less than I wanted this week.

The Harvest Run was as expected. We arrived early, with the temp's in the mid 50's. This quickly changed of course with the start of the run at the sweat starting. There were more runners this year, and I felt like the first mile of the run went much slower, due to race congestion. For anyone thinking of running this race, you are not getting a PR on this race; its just a very fun race to run in. After the first mile, I hit "the hill" which really is one kilometer of up. This is a trailish run through a grape/wine orchard. There is minimal footing, rough terrain and no real easy spots, save the first mile of which is usually pretty congested. This year, I ran up 1/4 of the hill, and fast walked up the rest. Last year, I killed myself trying to charge up the hill. Being the first time I ran it, I didn't have anything left for the last part of the race and ended up walking a majority of it. After the top of the hill, I resumed near my normal pace and finished 2 1/2 minutes faster then last year. (30:24). I could have finished it probably in the 29:00's if I would have pushed it after the fill, but miscalculated how far I had left. (will not make that mistake next year)

We have less than one month until the Grand Rapids Half Marathon and have one race before then, the VASA 5k trail run on October 10th. Corey and I ran that yesterday afternoon after the Harvest Stompede as a gauge to see where we were at. I finished that in about 29:00, and that was with a couple slow down/stop breaks because we had the dog with us. I hope to finish that race in the 27:00-28:00 range.

As a recap, the week's runs were as follows:

Monday - 3.5 miles @ 8:50 pace
Tuesday - 4.0 miles easy @ 9:36 pace treadmill
Wend - 4.0 miles easy @ 9:36 pace treadmill
Saturday - 3.1 miles Harvest Stompede - 29:24 finish
3.1 miles VASA run - 29:10 finish

1 comment:

  1. I love you & had a blast at the "Stompede"! Here's to the next race - VASA - we gonna kill it!

    ReplyDelete