I swore off races with distances shorter than 15k for the rest of this year and possibly pretty much until my first 50k............. BUT this race would be Rocky's first race and with other dogs and people (!!) and I figured I wouldn't be a fast run that would risk me being fatigued for tomorrow's 16-18 miler so I thought what the hell .
The race was at 8 AM, we left the house at 7 and since the race was at the Vanderburgh Humane Society which was only a 3 minute drive from the shop I decided to stop at the shop first and use the bathroom. We got to the race 15 minutes before the start, had I known that they had an unleashed area for the dogs to hang out and play before (and after) the race I would have taken Rocky over there so he would have met some of the dogs. Instead we walked over to the start, and Rocky was excited as he was seeing other dogs. I decided to walk down a ways from the start, even ran a little to get Rocky's bowels moving so we wouldn't have to stop mid-way or even once during the race. Lucky for me, Rocky went to the bathroom and we headed back to the start. We didn't start until 8:07 and Rocky was losing his mind standing there wanting to say hi to every single dog and person, so much so that he was whining and whimpering and I was a little embarrassed.... almost wondering if this was a good decision. It was cold, 52 degrees and a bit of a breeze and cloudy, perfect running weather but not so great when you're standing still.
We finally got going, and it was really tough hanging onto Rocky... he was dragging me and it was hurting my arms, within the first half mile him and a husky got tangled up for a second with the leashes.... they were more interested in playing than running. After we got on the greenway, and away from a few of the dogs Rocky seemed to get serious. At this point my arms were already sore, and I was a little worried that this was an out and back course, but luckily Rocky was on my right side on the way back and he was all business so passing dogs wasn't a problem.
But we were taking it easy, or at least it felt relatively easy which is exactly what I wanted it to be. We ran 3.1 miles in 27:02 with an average pace of 8:43 min/mile, not bad at all for Rocky and me and it didn't even really feel that hard at all so that is good news. Rocky was 3rd finisher dog while I placed 7th in women overall, but we had to leave and I didn't know about any medals or trophies that the dogs get :(
Laps/splits were:
Mile 1 - 9:13
Mile 2 - 9:02
Mile 3 - 8:25
.1 - 7:21
Not a bad race really, I had no plans of putting out a hard effort and this really didn't feel hard at all. I'm feeling pretty good for tomorrow's 16-18 miler.
No comments:
Post a Comment