Race Recap: Rice University Track Meet

Emily first. My hope for Emily was that she could at least knock a couple of seconds off her 5k PR. One problem: her PR was already really, really good. It’s the nature of sports that you’re going to have days where, for no obvious reason, you are just lights out awesome. The only problem is that it’s hard to replicate that magic, and that’s the story of Em’s 5k. She ran 16:33 two years ago at this very same meet, getting dragged through the first 3k behind 3 very talented runners, then hanging on for dear life. It is easily her best time at any distance. A lot of runners, once they’ve had a magical race like that, struggle for years to improve on the mark.

Women's 5000m...waiting to start the race

So that’s the background on the race. Emily’s workouts have been going great, faster than two years ago, but you still have to get it done on race day. Once we got the heat sheets, it was pretty clear there were only two competitors who were fast enough to be running 16:30 pace. One was Betzy Jimenez (a UT alum with PRs of 4:21, 9:18, and 16:14), and the other was Megan Jenkins, who beat Em in a road race in January, and was only a second or so behind her in her indoor 3k in 9:41 or 9:42. Here are my thoughts as the race played out:

Lap 1: Good, she’s in perfect position. Right behind Jimenez, 400 in 79. This is going to be just like two years ago!
Lap 2: Holy shit, either Jimenez is picking it up a TON, or Em is dying really, really early. Yep, 800 in 2:34 for Betzy, 2:36 for Em. Great, now she’s dropped and she’s not gonna be able to draft off of anyone.
Laps 3-5: Well, she’s not drafting off of anyone, but hey she’s clicking off 78s to 80s, and actually, Betzy seems to be coming back a little...
Lap 6: Damnit Emily, why are you leading the stupid race! They’re just going to sit behind you and let you do all the work!
Laps 7-12: Ok, I take it back...I guess she’s going to win?

So long story short, Emily won the race in 16:38, 5 seconds off of her PR but still, in my humble estimation, a great run in a situation that was very different than a rabbited race like she had last time. And at the end of the day, the goal every time you line up should be to win the race, and that she did.

You can check out her race video HERE

Me time. I ran the 10k, even though I knew the 5k is more consistently competitive, because I wanted a good 10k PR. I’ve used the past 3 months as a time to work on my “speed”, which relative to the marathon means 5k to 10k. I already got what I consider a decent 5k PR this year (15:02), so now it was time to take care of the 10k. Plus it’s closer to the marathon, so it makes a good transition into the next stage of training. My best time going into the race was 31:52, two weeks ago at Bayou City. Now that was a race in the middle of a storm, so I knew I could go faster without 18-20mph winds, but the question was how much faster?

   

I was incredibly happy when the race started that I was able to tuck into the back of a large group of guys running 75s, or 5:00 mile pace. Unfortunately the group started thinning out pretty rapidly after 4-5 laps, and by the 2 mile mark I was in 3rd place. 1st was a Rice guy who had gone out much harder than us, and 2nd was an A&M Corpus guy that I was following. At lap 10 I moved ahead of him and into 2nd, and from then on out it was a balancing act between running even 5 minute pace on the one hand, and trying to catch the Rice guy on the other hand. Emily gave me an update on how far ahead he was (around 18 seconds at the halfway mark) each lap. 

Rob giving Jer splits at the finish

Over the next couple miles I slowly, slowly clawed my way back up to within 3 seconds of the leader, but by then I was so gassed that I wouldn’t have known what to do if I caught him. So that was frustrating, but on the plus side I got a hell of a kick each time I hit a new mile mark. Under 10 minutes for 3200m is much, much faster than I ever ran in high school. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve run faster than my 5k splits, 15:33. 4 miles in 19:57, awesome. I was really hoping to see sub 25 on the clock at 8k, but 25:01 was still really cool. My final time of 31:15 comes out to exactly 75 seconds per lap, exactly what I set out to do, so I’m extremely happy with the result. I’ll do another blog post on where we’re going from here, but this blog post is definitely long enough already.

You can watch the last 10 minutes of my race HERE