Chase Your Shadow 5K

I was joking that the Groundhog was wrong after he called for six more weeks of winter, but he got his revenge on us this morning. At least on those of us who ventured south of Cleveland to Portage Lakes for the Chase Your Shadow 5K. It was 40 and nice when I left my house, but looked like this when we arrived:

The roads were in pretty bad shape too. Very slushy and packed snow/ice in some spots when I did my warm up. While I wasn't expecting a PR in February, I knew from workouts that I was pretty fit so I decided that my pre-race plan would be to pace it like a cross country race and just deal with the elements as they came. This was the scene as we got ready to go over to the starting line:

The race wasn't as bad as I thought it would be though. The first mile had a decent gradual elevation and I was able to work my way into third by then and I could tell that I was gaining on the guy in second but it would take some work to get there. Just after the mile we looped around and came back and I was able to take advantage of the net downhill mile two to catch the guy in second with about 3/4 of a mile to go.  I battled it out as best as I could over the last bit with the youngster I caught but he was able to break me with about 600 to go and though I finished strong I didn't quite have it to go with him. In any case I was third overall in 18:07, which translates to 5:50 pace on the nose. My pacing was pretty even. I was around 11:35 at 2 miles and didn't slow down too much in the hilly section of the final mile, so all and all a solid showing for my first race of 2012. As you can see I'm pretty happy post-race after a warm meal!

A good start to the year. For the next month or two, I'll continue to run mostly easy mileage at my 60-70% heart rate zone with a few tempos thrown in before getting into some more race pace specific stuff.