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JCU Twilight Meet

April 19, 2013 (Afternoon)

Exercise Type: Run

Weather: low 40s and very windy

Comments:
Drove over to JCU at 5pm. Guess that might have been a little on the early side because it turned out to be really cold outside. Went to their gym for a while to wait before warming up. MJ joined the group during the warmup and despite the weather I actually got pretty toasty running around with layers on. Headed back to the gym to get my uniform/spikes/bag/other stuff and my legs felt awesome. sort of similar to how your legs feel if you're in the middle of a hard interval workout and then get wayyy too much rest after one of them, like they're ready to just take off. In a workout, you know that you'll get tired and run the wrong pace if you do that but before a race it was a great and very encouraging feeling to have. Drilled while waiting for race time to get closer. Turns out they were running like 20 minutes early, so had to get spiked up and strides real quick but none of it messed with my mental state coming into the race. It was chilly near the line but I wasn't cold to the bone so that was fine. The ref let people do a stride before starting if they wanted to, so the whole field did, except for me. I was in the zone, doing my own thing. Normally I'd have just followed along but I was doing what I needed to do. Got lined up again and the gun went off.

Didn't push for position at all in the first straight, just let the group pull ahead of me, figured they'd be going out quicker than I wanted. Was in last with Brando ahead of me at the 300m point, then he took off and moved up a bit. Went through 400 in dead last in 72, which was fine because I was right on pace. Didn't want to let the pace fall off though so I got rolling a little and passed the guy in front of me. Passed another guy either before or after the 800m point which was 2:26. Knew I was slowing down so I started putting more effort into it... with about 500-550 to go I could feel the lactic acid starting to get going in my arms and thought that the last lap might be interesting but I kept rolling... heard a split of 76 which was slow but I did my best to get rolling. Didn't kick maybe quite as hard as I would ave liked or as early, but I passed the guy between me and the rest of my workout group just before the home straight and put a pretty solid last 200m in.

The main thing that strikes me about this race relative to any other races I've run since high school is that not once did I think about how bad it was going to hurt later. I wasn't avoiding the subject deliberately, it just wasn't a factor at all. I just focused on the pace, on the people in front of me, keeping my eyes up and my arms down and it felt awesome. I'm happy with this race, even if I would have liked to have the time quicker. Not gonna affect how I look at it though, this was a great race for me. If I can get myself in the same mental state before all my races from here on, I'm going to do well next year.