Angills Can Fly

I’m BACK! It’s race season folks and I decided to kick off this season with an attempt to better my 1/2 marathon time from Philly last year. I am registered for a 1/2 iron distance at Racine this year so this was the perfect opportunity to taste the run portion of that race. My neighbor Dan Lowrance is planning to accomplish his first triathlon this year; as a former cross country runner he decided to join me on this race. We had a couple training runs in the past few weeks (8 miles, 11.5 miles, and 3.5 miles) and our goal was to hold a 10 min pace together.

It was a beautiful morning, I woke up at about 3:45 and took about 15 mins to mentally prepare before I got out of bed. I came downstairs and ate a bowl of instant oatmeal (2 packets) and had 2 cups of coffee while I tweeted a bit. I was disapointed to find that my laptop had gone into sleep mode overnight and my Garmin (which was charging via usb) was left on all night. So I had to charge my Garmin using a DC inverter in the car on the way to the race. We left at 5 am right on time and Dan’s wife Melissa joined us as well; it was a very nice drive into the city, very little traffic the entire way.

We arrived around 6:10, had no trouble parking in the Aqua garage. We hit the bathrooms early after an hour drive and another cup of coffee and there was almost no line. We then stretched and took a short 1/2 mile warmup before the start. As the gun went off my Garmin was having trouble with satellites so I didn’t get the full race recorded but once we got out by the lake I was able to get a good signal. We got out a bit faster than originally planned and found ourselves out in front of the 9 min pacer around mile 5 so we slowed up a bit just before the 1/2 way point of the race. I was feeling good but I think the faster pace took a bit out of Dan. We maintained about a :9:50 pace between miles 6 and 10, and then Dan told me to go on without him so I could get the most out of the race but I declined. I told him we started together and we would finish together and I was not going to let him quit with 3.1 miles to go. Our pace fluctuated between miles 10-12 quite a bit while Dan pushed hard then we would slow to mid 11′s while he recovered. I asked him around mile 11.5 if he was getting wind back in his sails but he said no. We picked up the pace around mile 12.5 to high 8′s and carried a 4:03 pace across the finish line…  Dan right there with me so he pulled it together for a strong finish. I feel pretty confident that I could have finished under 2 hours had I been running alone but camaraderie was more important to me than the finishing time. Full image gallery here.

This was the inagural year of this race and I must say it was very well organized. The course was very comfortable with only minor inclines and declines and an amazing view of Lake Michigan and the Chicago Museum District. Parking was easily accessible and everything was extremely well marked. I will definitely be back for this race next year and I would STRONGLY reccomend this race to both new runners and veterans.

As a final note for this blog entry I decided to wear my “where is Holdie” shirt again as he has now returned to running but is still struggling with the knee as I blogged about in the Philly 1/2 post and I hope he makes a full recovery soon. If you see this Matt we WILL run a race together in the future!

Official:
10k-1:01:11 10k pace-9:51 overall-2:10:29 pace-9:58

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 17th, 2009 at 4:20 pmand is filed under Races. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.