This weekend's crimescene was the Dartmouth Relays up at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH. My first indoor track race in almost a decade. I decided to run the 5000 Meters while only having done base mileage over the course of the past 2 months. I snuck in the occasional tempo run and one hill workout last week, but other than that, I have done no speed work whatsoever. I really didn't know what to expect and figured it could go either way. A big part of me was hoping for a breakthrough, and yet an even bigger part of me was planning for the worst. I ended up going with the advice of a former college teammate who told me to take it one lap at a time and one quarter at a time...figure out my pace, pay attention to the splits, and try to maintain the pace I'm shooting for. This worked pretty well and took me to a 15:39.44 [results] and my 2nd generation PR in the 5k. I ran very even splits and maintained a nice rhythm until a slight mishap over the last half mile. The effort was good enough for 2nd place overall and 8 points. That 8 points was good enough to place MVS as a team, in 15th out of 34 (gotta love track!). The race itself was a mixed bag. I rode 4th place for the first 2 laps (400 meters) then moved up to the front and took charge of the pace after we came through the first quarter in 1:20 (far slower than I wanted to run for pace). Even though I didn't want to do it this way, I led for about 17 laps, doing most of the work for myself and for the Williams runner who sat on my shoulder the entire time. With 6 laps to go, he moved around and passed me. With 5 laps to go, my mind wandered just a tad and I stepped on the inner rail on the far side of the track and rolled my ankle rather badly. Being already committed to the race (with only a half mile to go), I kept banging away and finished only 2 seconds back of the winner.

After cooling down with the fellas from CMS, my ankle got progressively worse. At the time of penning this entry, I am icing it and can barely walk.

Overall, the weekend was rather long but fun. Kristin and I drove up to Dartmouth on Saturday morning to see Mike Masse run the mile in the High School section of the relays. We stayed overnight and then sat around for most of the day on Sunday, in the field house, allowing me to spend an awful lot of nervous energy worrying about the race while I watched some former teammates run their races. Kevin Alliette (Whirlaway) ran a pretty solid mile earlier in the day and UML had a decent effort overall as a team.

The always lovely and talented Kristin took pictures ....however this was our first time using the camera indoors and the results were not as we expected. Every setting produced blurry images. We're not sure why, as we haven't played around with it enough to figure out the optimal settings for indoor use. Deal with it!

5k Splits per quarter:

400 - (1:20) 1:20
800 - (1:12) 2:33
1200 - (1:13) 3:46
1600 - (1:13) 5:00
2000 - (1:14) 6:14
2400 - (1:15) 7:30
2800 - (1:15) 8:45
3200 - (1:16) 10:02
3600 - (1:16) 11:19
4000 - (1:16) 12:36
4400 - (1:15) 13:51
4800 - (1:13) 15:04
5000 - (:35) 15:39