Icicle 10-Miler Recap

Today I ran a 10 mile road race, which forced me to change up my week a little bit. I ended up trading a little bit of mileage for quality and ran 2 workouts and this race. I went into this race about as fresh as I have been since I started this training cycle after the Rothman 8k, but I was by no means taking a full taper into this. Basically I wanted this to be a good indicator of my fitness. The course has some hills and the weather, a chilly 22 degrees and breezy, probably affected times a little bit as well.

Feeney, Me, Digennaro at the mile

As to the race itself, I didn't know how hard I would end up running this beforehand, since my goals were to win and maybe get the course record if I felt good (54:03). I started out with Mike Digennaro and Dan Feeney for the first few miles and took the lead for good just before 5 miles (26:25). The first half of the race is where most of the hills are so I ended up having a solid negative split and won in 52:32 for a new course record. Even though the downhills in the second half of the race made it fast, I could feel my legs taking a beating and knew I would be feeling the race later. Digennaro and I pushed the hills hard in the first 4.5 miles but I didn't run flat-out over the last few miles, since I was confident in the gap I had and the downhills were hard enough as it was. There was a really tough hill in the last mile but other than that the finish was nice and I cruised it in without trying to force out an extra few seconds.

After the race my legs feel very beat up. I knew I would feel pretty bad but the cooldown was hilariously slow (somewhere near 9 minute pace) and we all felt terrible. Just sitting around my legs are quite sore and I know I won't be able to run a quality workout for a few days. It's amazing how a tough course even a less-than-100% effort can take a long time to recover from. I remember after my half-marathon this fall it took over 10 days to fully bounce back from that effort, so hopefully this doesn't sideline me for that long as I would like to get back to quality training as soon as possible. There is something to be said for the fitness gained from this hard and long of an effort, and this is just the kind of work I'm looking for in January.

Feeney and I post-race

Tomorrow I fly out to San Diego to see some friends and the weather there will be a welcome respite from 25 and windy here in DE! Hopefully they take it easy on me out there and don't run me into the ground too hard or I'll have to come back early.