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Surprising Myself!

April 16, 2019 (Afternoon)

Exercise Type: Run

Comments:
I was horrified last night when I saw in Anthony's email that I was running the 32 in this meet. I briefly considered using some senior privilege and the prospect of getting horrible allergies to beg him to switch the event I was running, but quickly decided that if Matt could run 26 miles on his own, I could run 2 with lots of people around me. This decision did not, however, mean I couldn't complain and worry about it from the time I woke up until 6:45 when we started running.

Bussed to the meet because I was feeling really tired. Did a lap warmup with Mia, stretched, hung around and chatted with Camilla for a bit. Then cheered for the 800. So impressed by a lot of those runners, but especially Halle—first meet and she was in the front of the race for quite a while! Wow. Hung out with Lauren until it was time to warm up. Then Jeff, Arthur, Maddi, Tara, Lucia, and I did a very nice jog through some trails on campus, did drills while discussing Muzzy (aka LMS language classes), Dora, and other childhood TV shows. Just as we were about to spike up, Nomi came by to tell us that we still had 35 minutes before our race. Somehow they'd gotten 20 minutes behind during our warmup. A bit frustrating, but we just chilled for 15 minutes and stayed loose. Finally, we got on the line to start. The seeding was random, so I had no idea where I'd be, but almost immediately, the group pulled away and it was just Tara and me behind, which honestly was fine by me. So glad I had her there though because that first mile would have been very lonely otherwise. I decided to run without my watch which I rarely do because I didn't want to get too focused on splits and also wanted to see how good my pacing actually is. Definitely a bit outside my comfort zone, but also quite freeing. Our first lap was way too fast which I knew as we were doing it, but I felt like Tara wanted to try to stay with the group and I didn't want to stop her, so I went along with it. We slowed down to a better pace for the rest of the first mile though. We tried to switch off who was leading, but were pretty well matched for each other. At the mile, Tara said, "let's surge" to me and sped up for a minute and I followed her, but I think we went back to our original pace pretty quickly. After another lap, though, I realized I didn't actually feel THAT tired and I should probably be pushing a little more. I sped up and pulled away from Tara. There was nobody else in sight, but I've gotten pretty comfortable lately with running alone, so I didn't mind. The sixth and 7th laps were harder, but I stayed very focused (and also the cheering was AMAZING)! Starting the last lap, I dug deep and tried to speed up every 100 meters. Finished with a pretty darn good kick in 15:09. I had no time expectations for this because I've only run the 32 twice before and I don't remember those times (though I'm pretty sure this was a PR), but I'm quite happy with this time, and I think now that I know how to pace it better, I could be significantly faster. I don't remember lap splits, but my mile splits I believe were 7:31 and 7:38 which I'm super happy with for running it solely by feel without a watch. Got the biggest runner's high after this race and ran around barefoot laughing maniacally like a nut with Nomi for my cooldown. So fun. I love this team and this sport and this season. And I've gotta say, it was a hard race, but I wouldn't be angry if I were in another 32 this season. Hint hint wink wink Anthony.