Woo hoo!

Ran in an event called the Nielson Challenge today. It's basically a 2-mile practice race on a very flat course that occurs on the first Saturday of every month. After your first race, you are given a handicap (pretty much equal to the running average of your top 6 times during the last 24 months, with some incentives added if you run more often) and all other races are run against the handicap. The person who beats their handicap by the largest amount wins the race. It's a pretty neat event considering that you can win the race even if you come in last place...you just have to improve over your average time by the most amount. More details can be found at the Pikes Peak Road Runners website: http://www.pprrun.org/

The reason for the exclamation in the title of this post was because I beat my running goal by a lot! I was aiming to run under an average pace of 10 minutes/mile (in other words, run the race in under 20 minutes) while running negative splits (i.e. run the 2nd half of the race faster than the first half of the race). I ended up running the race in 16:09. My first mile was somewhere around 8:16. That puts my 2nd mile at 7:53! The average for both miles was 8:09. Not only did I accomplish everything that I set out to do, I did it in style! I was able to run the last 1/8 mile at pretty much a full sprint. I used to be able to do this in highschool, but I was usually disappointed in myself because I felt that I had saved too much energy for the end. In this race, I felt like I had worked hard throughout the race and that the sprint at the end was everything I had to give.

One thing that I learned about was that my max heart rate is 188 beats per minute (at least that was the heart rate I had at the finish line). I also realized that my training runs can probably be run at a slightly faster pace. Unfortunately, one of the things that came up this week is that my training runs are taking up too much time. I'll have to reduce the number of times a week that I run from 5 to 3. As a result, I've just totally revised my training schedule between now and October 28th. My goal for this year's race is to run at a 7:39 pace, putting my race finishing time at 23:46. That's a 30 second improvement over today's race pace...I think I should be able to do that over the next 8 weeks.