Cheerfund Challenge 15K

Before talking about my run, I'd like to congratulate my friend John who ran his first 50 mile ultra yesterday. He smashed his goal of 10 hours by running 9:02. He was also drawn for one of the holy grails of Ultra running, the Western States 100, and ran under the 50 mile qualifying of 11 hours. He's running a 100-miler next June!

My day yesterday was not quite so smashing. My run was OK. Not fabulous but not disappointingly bad either. I was tired (I know, what else is new?), I couldn't sleep the night before and woke up at 4:30 am - not due to race anxiety or anything, I just woke up and couldn't go back to sleep.

Oh, I did have one major panic moment the night before though... I was charging my Garmin. I went back to check to see if it was done charging and the whole watch screen was blank, still attached to the charger. I couldn't get the watch to turn on. I messed with the charger, checked all the connections, still NOTHING. I thought it was dead. How was I going to pace myself without my Garmin? It was 11 pm on Friday and the Garmin website told me customer support left at 5 pm. In desperation I switched chargers and plugged the Garmin in with my husband's cell phone charger. The watch screen immediately lit up, fully charged. I have no idea what happened but I was just thankful it was working again.

So the race is called the "Challenge" because the 15K runners and the 15K relay teams start at the same time and see if one runner can beat a relay team, or vice versa. My personal goal was to try and run an 8:20 pace. So...

Mile 1 - 8:19
Mile 2 - 8:20
Mile 3 - 8:10, yup, gonna pay for that later
Mile 4 - 8:18
Mile 5 - 8:15
Mile 6 - 8:38, stopped for water and couldn't get restarted
Mile 7 - 8:34
Mile 8 - 8:48
Mile 9 - 9:19
last 0.3 - 2:53

Official time - 1:19:33
Average pace - 8:32

I came totally unglued at the 8 mile mark. I actually had third place overall within my sights. I was less than 50 yards behind third place when I stopped for water at about 5.5 miles. I was still trying to catch her through mile 7. Then I got passed by 2 more runners at the 8 mile mark. One was a relay runner but the other was a 15K runner in my age group. I ran out of steam after that and just couldn't get my legs to move any faster. I ended up 5th overall in the women's race, 2nd in the 40-49 age group; 44 seconds behind 1st in my age group and 1:26 behind 3rd overall. The woman that won third overall averaged an 8:22 pace. I did manage to run faster than 2 of the 8 relay teams.

I think I ran as hard as I could have on that day. My legs were still tired from running 20 three days before. I think I was still physically tired from staying up 36 hours plus the day before. I've come to the conclusion that I might not be fast enough on marathon day to run 3:55. I'm worried about my endurance. All I can hope for is that I will run better when I am well rested.

This is how the week ended up looking...

Sunday - rest
Monday - 5 miles
Tuesday - 10 miles
Wednesday - 20 miles
Thursday - 5 miles
Friday - rest
Saturday - 10 miles

So 50 miles for the week.

I ran 5 today. I was going to try a pace run and ran the first mile in 8:33 but my legs felt like wood after that. I ended up slowing down and will do my pace run later this week.