Race report and weekly recap

Race report, Cobble Hill 10k: My goal going into this race was to run faster than last years 43:21, hoping to go somewhere between 41:40-42:30. The main thing was that I didn't want to change my training this year as last year I missed too many Saturday long bike rides. So as a pre-cursor, I nailed my training all week, including a good 4 hour ride with a good training partner Jeff Savage on Saturday, and an excellent track session on Tuesday with running rival and great friend Eric Purves(Achieve Health). So I was feeling tired going into the race, but very happy with a good week of training in my legs and looking forward to what I could do. We started off with a good 20 minute warm up with a few pick ups, and were feeling good when we were jogging to the start line only to see them start the race as we were still about 500 meters from the start. Unfortunately for us, this meant weaving through the back of the field for the first kilometer and a half, which although a bit exciting, caused the first few k's to be tougher than usual. I was hoping to hold 4:15's for the first 5k, and then pick it up from there, but I just could not push my legs any harder than they were going. I got to 5 k, and just decided to make it a good hard tempo day, and settled in at the pace I was running, holding a good pace at a heart rate zone I want to hold for my half mary races later in the year. The last 5 k were pretty uneventful, I dropped Eric at about 5k, he was feeling terrible as well, and ended up running the next 4k with a kid who was at most 10 years old who was just killing it!~! This kid was pretty cool as well, he was shooting the breeze with me as we were going and asking me questions about running, it was awesome. Makes me really look fwd to one day having me own kids and taking them out running and riding. Good stuff. The last k I picked it up and ran harder, coming though the finish in a very pedestrian 43:45 on my watch(gun time was 44:20, but we missed the start...). The good news is that I had no problem settling in and holding a strong pace all day, the bad news is, I just couldn't push any harder. All in all though, I am relatively happy with getting some harder work in, and extremely satisfied with the week I put in. Approx numbers are 17+ hours of training, 10+km of swimming, 60+ km of running and 200+km of riding with 3 solid core sessions. Now the main goal going fwd is to keep this up consistently which is always a problem for me, but I know that if I can be consistent, I can be fast and competitive in my age group.

Cheers,
Mike