Trail Mix 25k

I signed up for this race when I realized that, unfortunately, I had missed the window to sign up for the Zumbro 17 and it had filled up.  I had heard the Trail Mix was a good, fast race. With the strength work I've been doing due to "Training for the New Alpinism" and our Parkour process, I found my pace increasing in my workouts and was curious what I could do for a 25k.

This was not any sort of goal race for me, so I trained straight through it. Tuesday, I ran a hill workout and did Parkour. Wednesday, I ran 7 miles, did a strength workout, and went to Parkour. I ran shorter the next couple days in the lead up to the race, but still wasn't exactly rested by the time race day arrived. A 50 hour workweek and a difficult week in other ways didn't help anything.

I did, though, have a plan for the race itself. I figured I could run around 7:40 pace for the first 12.5k lap, then speed up gradually through the second lap and see if I couldn't finish in under two hours. I chose 7:40 because that's about what I've been running on my easy runs down Summit lately. I knew this was going to be a difficult run for me, because I hadn't done many long runs to this point, and I hadn't even run the full distance yet (something I like to do before a run this short).

The race itself went pretty well.

After the initial blast off the start line, I quickly settled in to a slightly faster pace than I had anticipated. I fell in with a couple high-schoolers out for a long run, and talked for a few miles until they fell off the pace. 3.5 miles in, I hit the second aid station, having run 7:33 pace for the first section.

The second aid station was also the high point of the lap, and I took up with a group of runners at a slightly faster pace (7:20 or so) for this section. I still felt really strong and smooth, so I decided to go with it. It started to get hot by this point (I'd already taken my shirt off in the first 3 miles), and I was dousing myself in water at each aid station once I'd had a little (flat) coke and water.

I ran by the half-way aid station at a little over 58 minutes.

As you recall, my plan was to up the pace a little bit the second half of the race, but I started faster than I planned. I opted to try and push the pace just a bit, but not as much as I had originally planned, then hit it hard from the second aid station. For the first 3.5 miles of the second lap, I managed exactly 1 second per mile faster than the first time through this section.

I attempted to go hard from the second aid station again, managing the low-7s and high-6s for a short while. But once I got to about 12 miles, I started to really feel the training earlier in the week and the fact that I'd been running pretty hard for an hour and a half. At that point, it became a matter of just maintaining speed and trying not to fall off too much.

I pulled in to the finish in 1:56:23, for a significant PR and a slight negative split (or so the pace on my watch said).

All told, I'm pretty happy with it. For a start of the season test, off a relatively hard week of training, it went remarkably well. I made my goal of negative splits for each lap (again, barely), and I PRed in the 25k by something like 20 minutes.

I wish I'd had a little more time to hang out after the race, as I met some interesting other runners there that I would have liked to chat with more. But the day was just beginning, so I was off and on my way within 10 minutes of finishing.

Between that, and testing for Parkour the next day (yesterday as I write this), I'm beat.