Race Recap: Fiesta Mission 10k

Jer: I went into this race looking to get a good hard effort in before marathon training totally sapped my legs - as of race day, I have exactly 8 weeks until Grandma’s marathon on June 16th. I knew going into the race that because of the course, any thoughts of hitting a PR were out, but I wanted to run a decent time and see if I’ve lost any fitness since the Rice meet three weeks ago. The course may have been hillier than anything I’ve run in the last year, but on the other hand, the weather on race day was absolutely PERFECT. I figured I’d just try to run smart on the uphills, make up the time on the downhills, and hope that it all added up to good time.

 

As the gun went off, it quickly separated out into a three man race: me, Rob, and a local guy named Dan Welsh. Dan hung on for a while, but by a mile or so it was Rob and me running side by side. I got a little bit of distance on Rob at around two miles, then lost it when I almost took a wrong turn. Soon after, I recaptured the lead, and although Rob was never too far back, I held it the rest of the way to the finish. My final time was 32:12, closely followed by Rob in 32:48. Given that we covered pretty much every major hill in the Alamo Heights area, I’m really happy with the time, and I think it’s not too much worse a performance than my 10k PR at Rice. 

I followed Saturday’s race up with a 20+ mile run Sunday morning, which felt absolutely terrible. I wanted to stop, lay down on the side of the road, and take a nap by about an hour. Unfortunately, that may have more to do with staying up late drinking margaritas and less to do with actual running, so I’m going to try being a little better about the non-running factors (staying hydrated, getting plenty of sleep, etc) going forward.

Em: Well Emily looks really tired right now, so I’m going to recap this thing on her behalf. Em went into this race just hoping to run an okay time. I think 36:00 to 36:30 would have been perfectly acceptable, given that she hasn’t been doing much specific work in the last couple weeks.

Fortunately, Em doesn’t really pay attention to splits during races, so she ended up running entirely by feel, moving up pretty much continuously throughout the race. She started out in maybe 7th-8th place overall, but got up to 5th place by mile 4. She would end up finishing at that spot, and unfortunately she ran so fast that I thought I would have another minute to get some water before I needed to go cheer for her. 

 

About a half mile in

A little after 5k

Lots of smiles, even when she's going uphill 

On this exact same course, in August, Emily ran 36:30 or so, but Saturday she ran 35:22, which actually makes this a 10k personal best for her. As her coach, I think this just goes to show that sometimes all of the little nitpicky decisions that I make, things like which workout she runs on this Tuesday or that Sunday, sometimes don’t mean as much as the big picture. The big picture is that Em has averaged very close to 80 miles per week for the last year, and has been averaging over 10 miles per day for 2-3 years. That type of consistency, over time, means that you are going to be good at running, regardless of how much you taper, what kind of course you’re on, or the exact workouts you do. The long and short of it though, is that Emily ran faster Saturday than she ever has for a 10k race, and I’m pretty impressed. Heck, she even looked good doing it...

Em and me helping to lead the kiddos in their 1 mile race

**Thanks to David Guzman of Soler's Sports and Tom Lake of San Antonio Road Runners on the AMAZING pictures they took at the Fiesta Missions 10k!

What We're Up To Next

Well, for one, we’re going to Minnesota in June.  Emily will be racing the US Half Marathon Championships, and I will be competing at Grandma’s Marathon (these are part of the same event; Grandma’s is hosting the Half Champs).  Since up until now I had been focused on the 5k and 10k in 2012, and Em had been focused pretty much only on the 5k, this means a dramatic shift in training.  Emily has so far just been cranking up her mileage into the upper 80s and hitting some basic workouts, while I’ve jumped into a series of longer runs/workouts.  Here’s what I’ve done so far:

3/31: 24 mile long run, with last 10 miles at about 6:10 pace.  I died hard on the last 5 miles of this run, I had been running with Rob but he ended up putting 3-4 minutes on me during that stretch.

4/8: 22+ mile long run easy.  Nothing real interesting about this one.

4/14: 3+ mile warmup, 17 miles at 5:51 pace, total of a little less than 21 miles.  This was hard but obviously a good step forward compared to dying on the 3/31 long run when I tried to go faster.

In between these I’ve been doing some half marathon oriented workouts, using those to create a 2-3 week mini base phase.  Soon it’ll be time to drop the shorter workouts and focus only on marathon specific stuff, but I’ve enjoyed doing less time consuming things like a 6 mile tempo, 4x2 mile, etc. This little in-between season was capped with a 10k road race this morning, which went pretty well, but I'll recap that later.  

It was fun, in case you couldn't tell

So that’s a little rundown of what I’ve been up to.  I’ll try to be add some more frequent workout posts, since I think it’ll be an interesting experience training for a marathon in South Texas in April, May, and June.  At the very least, the race day weather shouldn’t be anything to be scared of!