Spokane River Run

This weekend was my first race since the Snake River 1/2 Marathon in early March, and I was very interested to see how my running fitness has responded since I've been running more consistently over the past few weeks.
To warm up, I was supposed to do a long swim and long-ish bike on Saturday, which (as expected :) turned into just a long swim. Oh well. After my big bike week last week and a century coming up this next weekend, I wasn't too concerned about getting a ride in this weekend. And I knew that the race on Sunday would beat up my legs pretty good. Thinking back, I was pretty happy with myself that I actually got into the pool and did a long workout by myself. Last year, this never would have happened. But I did get 3500 in, which included, just for fun, a 500yd time trial.
Sunday the weather forecast called for possible snow and cold temps. Uh, its April. Come on. Really? Well, at least I'm not as much of a weather wimp on the run as I am on the bike. I actually kind of enjoy running in inclement weather. It was cold at the start, but I was confident I would warm up nicely (I did). For those that have never done the Spokane River Run, I will describe it: trail race, very few flat sections, some very challenging rocky footing sections, some scary steep descents, and some hands-pushing-on-knees steep climbs. Or, TOUGH! They had 4 distances to choose from: 50k (next year, maybe), 25k, 10k, 5k. For the third year in a row, I opted for the 25k, with the only goal this year being to not get lost. My plan was to run conservatively, since I knew the difficulty of the course start to finish, and since I knew my run fitness was a bit behind last year. I ran most of the race w/ Brian right on my heels, which served to keep the pace honest, even though we went out a tick fast, at 7:30s. But I wasn't concerned so much about the pace, since I knew the hills would slow me up. I basically just wanted to run on "feel" and see what happened. About 3 miles in, the snow started, and while it wasn't sticking to the trail, it was flying pretty good...enough to make you have to squint to see where you were going. Fortunately at this point I was with a pack of other runners, so I wasn't forced to watch the course signs as closely. I made it thru 10 miles feeling pretty good, and then the gorgeous blue skies and sun came out, and it actually started feeling a bit warm. Wait, this IS the same race that it was snowing at, right??? This is how you know that a) you are doing a long race, or b) you are racing in Spokane, the capital of micro-climates. Over the last 5 miles, I didn't really feel like I let my pace drop that much, except when I was forced to slow up. That would be when we caught up to the back of the 10k pack. It was a bit frustrating, since I don't recall this happening in other years, but we 25k'ers were definitely running faster than the 10k'ers. Normally not a problem, except we were on very narrow, rocky trails right next to the river. Hmmm, so I had to bide my time for a bit behind some folks, take some risks getting around them, and try to ask as politely as possible if I could pass some others. Fortunately, I knew we were almost to the finish, so it was really only about the last 2 miles that I had to fight this. One positive benefit of this race planning snafu was that for those last 2 miles, I always had people ahead to key off of and run down. As the trail opened up onto the finishing section, I opened it up as much as I could and pushed for the tape, refusing to look at my time or HR :) My legs, as predicted and expected were dead once I finished, but thank goodness the kind folks from FRS were on hand to supply me with their liquid gold: Low Cal Peach Mango!! My official time was 2:04:44, which was a PR by almost 8:00. Whoa!! I am truly shocked that I was able to average 8:02's on that course, so that made me very happy. Overall, I finished 21st out of 168, and I finished 4th in my age group out of 18, which is sort of a bummer, but they were 10 year age groups, and I really wasn't expecting anything anyway, so, oh well. But....I'm not sure how many more 4th place age group finishes I can reasonably expected to handle :) Ok, probably alot more, as long as I'm having fun! However, I did not come away empty handed, as in the random number drawing, I won a pair of cool sandles/boat shoes/Teva-like things. Kind of on the weird side, but, hey, maybe they'll help me break out of my shell a bit! :)
It was a good day all in all, and I'm glad to have gotten another long run under my belt. Because of the difficulty of the course, I consider this to be more than a 15.5 mile day...probably closer to 18 on a normal, road run.
Overall, I am very happy with where my training is right now, especially since I felt like I lost alot of time because of my foot injury. This weekend started my string of 7 races in 10 weeks leading up to Ironman, and I must say, I am very happy to get into the part of my season where I get to pin some numbers on my chest. I love racing, love the nervous excitement while waiting for the gun to go off, love rehashing the race and reveling in the post-race glory with Andy, friends and teammates, love that "good hurt" feeling in my body that tells me I had a good effort. Because, really, at the end of the day, those are the things I really race for, not an age group medal........