Ahhhh, it was so nice to put on my "out of print" red Saucony A2's. I love these shoes and cherish my time in them. It's going to be a painful separation. I trained well for this race. I did a lot of downhill and did a good job maintaining some pretty good mileage after the Salt Lake Marathon in April. 4th in my age group for this race may be the best I'm ever going to see. I peeked ahead at next years competition in the 45-49 group and it ain't looking pretty at all for me placing with those boys. I'm leaning towards doing the marathon next year. The DesNews Marathon was my first a few years back in 2003. I want to come back and beat that course like it beat me in 03. I race a downhill 5K on the 4th of July and did well, so I had high expectations for this race. I knew I had 39 something in the bag with the possibility of something just a little better. The third place time was 37:23 so I do take some comfort in knowing that I was not strong enough to be rewarded with a spot on the podium. Sometimes it's better to be beaten soundly rather than being left to wonder where you could have picked up an extra 10 or 15 seconds along the way. So here's how it played out for me: 39:11 average pace 6:18 Mile 1 5:46 Mile 2 5:55 Mile 3 6:26 Mile 4 6:20 Mile 5 6:23 Mile 1.2 8:20 (6:52 pace) This is a tricky course, those first two miles are very fast. I honestly don't know if I would have done better with a slower start. On a flat course it seems like you can be a lot more methodical about a pacing strategy, with this race, my approach was to go out fairly hard and hang on for dear life. I didn't have much left in me for the last mile, I obviously used it at the top of the course. No regrets, I had a great time! | 