Lyons River Run 5k 2011

Thanks to Simon at RunColo.com, I scored a free entry to this race. He'd put a notice on Facebook asking people to submit their times from their last 5ks, and my 21:45 from last week's Father's Day race snagged me a spot. Of course, Simon's idea had been to take the two closest times and square them off against each other, and the person he'd selected to go against me had run her 5k in 20:44! That was a bit daunting. Unfortunately (or, from my perspective, perhaps fortunately), that person was unable to make the race after all, so I lucked out there.

However, I did see a familiar face up there that morning: the guy who had pulled ahead of me in the last mile at last week's race! Looked like I'd have a race on my hands after all. I was still a bit miffed that he'd beaten me in Arvada (by three seconds!), so now was my chance to even the score. Not that I'm super competitive or anything.

(I did see another familiar face--my buddy Double-N from Runner's Edge. He'd come up with his whole family to run the race. Shout out to them!)

My new Garmin arrived in the mail earlier in the week. But I decided not to wear it for the race. I hadn't worn it in Arvada last week, and had felt kind of free--I'd had no urge to glance down to check my pace, running instead entirely by feel, and wound up really pushing myself. So I thought I'd try the same thing for this race, and not worry about looking down and having to tell myself to pick it up or slow down to avoid burnout. I did, however, have my iPod, ready to go and fully charged.

I didn't exactly shoot out of the gate at a sub-seven minute mile. There was a pretty good sized crowd for this race, bigger than Arvada last week, and it took a solid half mile anyway to loosen up. I was able to get some space by taking one turn a bit wider than most everyone else (which also helped me avoid some pretty badly chewed up asphalt in favor of a smoother section of the road). I was still probably going an 8-minute pace for that first part, and once I got away from the crowd a bit I picked that up to about 7-minute pace. Or so--as I said last week, I'm very bad at estimating that without my Garmin.

However fast I was going, I was definitely making progress through the crowd. I also knew that I'd pull ahead of people during the climb at the end of the first mile. Just before the 1-mile mark, I eased back (only slightly) on my effort, settling into what I thought was a pace I could hold for the rest of the race. It wound up being a pace that I could hold for about the next mile. I felt myself slowing down (only a bit) after I passed the two mile mark. It was very warm, and I was a bit tired. Not that I'd slowed down a lot, I was still going at a decent clip. If I had to guess (I'm a terrible guesser, have I mentioned that?), I'd say I was running a 7:30. Still speedy, but not nearly as fast as last week. But I know I was slowing down, because I was being passed by people I'd passed earlier.

One of the runners who passed me at this point was a blonde woman with a paw print tattoo on her left calf. I remembered passing her in the first mile; when she pulled ahead of me I told myself I wouldn't let her out of my sight. If I thought I could pull it off, I'd try to pass her again before the finish; but at the very least, I'd keep right behind her. I chased her down all along that last mile, but never quite managed to catch her. I spoke with her afterward, and she said that she knew I was right behind her because she heard me breathing! Apparently I'm a very noisy breather, and this isn't the first race where somebody's said that.

So I couldn't catch my little rabbit, and I didn't set a new PR. But I had a very good race, and really only missed my PR by 20 seconds or so. I beat the guy who'd beaten me last week though, and by a bigger margin. But I also learned that I can run a pretty solid short race without my Garmin, and have decided to continue not using it for 5ks, and maybe anything short of a 10-mile race. Big congrats to everyone who ran this race, and especially Double-N and his family!

Official Time: 22:06
YTD Race Miles: 84
YTD Total Miles: 687
Post-race Indulgence: Cinnamon rolls!