Saturday, October 9, 2010

Stonewall Jackson 20 Mile Ambulance Run

Pat asked me to run this 20 mile race with him earlier in the week. He's training for Richmond and wanted to get in a good race-mentality effort. He said we'd start at 7:30 pace and knock it down 15-seconds per mile every 5 miles. That would have been 730, 715, 700, 645. We didn't quite proceed as planned. Also, he thought (and I agreed with him) that we'd probably be running in first place by the end of the race. We were wrong! Some guy finished 11 minutes ahead of us! I have no idea who it was either. Pat finished in 4th place, 8 seconds behind 3rd place. I was just pacing him so I didn't enter, but I could see 2nd place ahead of us too. It was some toe-stepping Marine who'd passed us probably around 6 or 7 miles. The two guys who I'd assumed were going to run away with it actually crashed hard and we passed them around mile 17. One of them held on and managed to finished a little behind Pat, but the only "real" looking runner blew up. He had on arm sleeves and everything.

The run was good though. I enjoyed it. I was pretty sore and in pain most of the way, but it was nice mentally going out there and just cruising for a while. It got easier for me as we went along, and it was good talking to Pat. He stopped talking in the last 6 or so miles because he was just trying to focus on staying on the pace, but I didn't mind. The weather was nice, it was sunny, and we just plugged along. It was like an easy long run with people giving me water every couple of miles.

Before the race I just warmed up to the starting line, and then afterwards we did about a mile in 10 minutes or so for a cool down. I could barely pick my feet up off the ground once we stopped. I'm sure I was a sight to see.



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Race Photos