Winter Beaches Run 2009

I had emergency dental surgery last Wenesday.

Thursday-Saturday my mouth was still in such pain that I was reluctant to eat.

Sunday morning… and I still did not feel like chewing anything…. I managed to down 12 or so mini pancakes for breakfast…

The race started at 1500 so… I never really ate lunch… just had a banana on the way out the door around 1:30…. Masey and Kendall decided to come with me

Had I not signed up for this race already… I probably would have skipped it but… It was already paid for and… I just needed to run an 8:11 pace to get seeded for the River Run next month… sounded easy enough….

We picked up Mark on the way… got to the race site plenty early for packet pickup etc… got in a warm-up mile and a couple of Porto-potty stops before the race started…

I ran in to my old friend Shawn:

Then spent a few minutes looking for Mark....

The gun sounded right at 1500 and we were off…

Just tried to stay relaxed and on pace for the first couple of miles… I wanted for it to feel easy… It did not but… ran a 7:57 and 8:03 anyway…

Settled in a bit on mile 3 but it was beginning to get hard to hold the pace…. 7:54

The beginning of the end was mile 5… I could not lie to myself anymore… this was not easy… it was not a relaxed pace… I had stomach cramps and my legs were very heavy… 8:42

The middle 5 miles was into a pretty stiff headwind… I managed to find a couple of big fellas to draft off of… they pulled me to an 8:26…

I knew that I was done tho… no need to lie to myself… I basically ran ~9:45 pace for the rest of the race

Looking back… I’m not sure if I bonked… or if I was still having dental surgery complications… or if I simply suck…

All that said… we all had a tremendous time… Just hanging out with each other and enjoying the day.