I only run on days that end in a "y."

Wonderful morning for a run.  I think the starting temp was 50 and the race began at 7 am - so we did not see sunrise until about 7:45 or so - most of the race was in the dark.  No wind - pretty close to perfect conditions.

I woke up at 5:15 and downed 2 scoops of carbopro and 1/2 scoop of powered gatorade mixed in water.  Got my stuff ready and headed out the door.  Met up with some other runners at the Annex around 6 am and went out for a 2.4 mile warm up run. 

15 minutes before the start I took a Gatorade Prime pouch and headed for the start.  We made our way through the crowd to get up front. 

My strategy was to start off in the 6:30s, conserve energy to get through the hills, and then pick up the pace from there.  The hills start around mile 2-3 and end around 4-5 or somewhere in there.  There are a couple of hills after mile 5 and then it flattens out back into town, with some minor inclines along the way, especially the last mile. 

I seem to run races like my training runs - go figure - and that means progressivley. 

I started out with a running buddy and we ran together until mile 6 or so when I started to pull away.  It was good though to keep the first miles in check.  It is hard to hold back when people are passing, but I kept telling myself to stick with the plan and save the energy.

I don't know what happened with mile 2, but I defintely left 12 seconds out there - I think I slowed down too much here - too worried about the hills coming up. 

Coming onto the hills I tried to take them a bit easy and if there was downhill to hit it a bit  faster - I just am not that good on downhills though so I am not sure what I picked up on the downhill parts that we had.  The hills were hard but not too bad - I just kept remembering the hill repeats we do when we get to the top we have to speed up to the end of the street - this came in handy today.  I ran the first 5 miles in 33:xx and thought I was really going have to speed up and run a negative split to make my goal - at the time I thought if I could run 1:05 I would be happy.

My last 2 miles were my best - there were a couple runners from my group that were in front that I had in my sights.  This really helped me drop the bomb on the last 2 miles and was a huge boost to pass both of them along the way.  I turned the corner towards the finish and could see 1:03:43 and ran as fast I could muster to get under 1:04 but alas it was not meant to be - I missed it by 6 seconds.  Still, very happy with the performance given the course and that I had not run it before.  I think next year I will be much better prepared.  The chart said I should be able to run a 10 mile race in 1:03:54 or something - so I have no doubt I could break that on a flatter course.  Looks like after today I will shoot for a 1:23-1:24 at the San Antonio half in 2 weeks.

Overall splits:  6:26, 6:43 (left 10 seconds out there), 6:42 (another slow mile, another 10 seconds), 6:34, 6:32, 6:30 (survived the hills), 6:16 (time to start picking it up!), 6:13, 5:57, 5:58.  Average pace 6:24 for the race.

4.25 miles easy around the trail after the race.