Monday, August 13, 2007

Falmouth Road Race

Alright, I've been talking about this for weeks, and working towards it since January. I was out of shape and overweight, and I needed to train to run this thing. I first ran this race in 2004 -- I was happy with my time, then. I ran it in 2005 and 2006 and was not happy with my time. I was happy with yesterday's run, I covered the 7 miles in 57:05 (by my watch)and 57:10 by the (un)official clock. Regardless, my average/mile pace was 8:09 or 8:10. Here's some data and where I finished:

There were 8,941 finishers (top 15%)
There were 4,879 men (top 20%)
There were 4,288 19-39 year olds (top 12% -- incl. women)
(I'm not giving the actual line here because I want to remain anonymous on the web, by and large. The folks who know me can look me up for the official info)

Here are my splits
Mile 1: 8:25
Mile 2: 7:53/16:18
Mile 3: 7:55/24:14 I messed up timing on 2-4, so this is slightly estimated.
Mile 4: 8:02/31:16
Mile 5: 8:12/40:29
Mile 6: 8:18/48:48
(10K): 50:40
Mile 7: 8:16/57:05

The race can be blown in the early miles as they are mainly rollers and I think I got in a bit of trouble there. You can see I was flagging a bit on 5-6 -- but I finished 6-7 faster than I went out, and there's a big old hill at the end. I gave it a good kick up the final hill (training and visualization helped on this) and I passed a couple of people on the way up who didn't catch me on the way down. I finished with a good kick. Overall I'm really happy with this result.

2 comments:

VT Runner said...

Congratulations! That's a great time, and I appreciate seeing the splits. The numbers alone give a story to the race. Based on the times, I imagine it was something like this:
Mile 1: Lots of people at the start, take it easy, don't roll an ankle.
Mile 2 - 3: Break free of the crowds, adrenaline kicks in.
Mile 4: Holy crap, I am flying. Better reign it in or I'm going to crash.
Mile 5 - 7: Push it, own the race, finish strong.

Great post. Great time. Way to take back the race.

Agricola said...

Thanks, man.

I'm psyched about how it went, and psyched about having trained well for it and working towards a goal. It felt good.