feelin' hot, hot, hot

well, the roles...or at least weather conditions were reversed for the june points races this year. Last year, the Mini 10K (women's points race) being hot as hell, while the Father's Day 5 miler (the men's points race, one week later, was perfect conditions. This year, the Mini 10K had perfect conditions...so you can guess what this year's Father's Day 5M was like.

Basically, after hearing that today would bring record high temperatures, I knew that would make for a slow race. And this is a fast course-clockwise lower 5, so no Harlem Hills or Cat Hill. My 5-mile PR was here 2 years ago, in much more favorable conditions.

So the fashion report-pretty much the same as last week-except I ditched the singlet before I even walked out the door. Yeah, pretty much down to the bare minimum.

The start was pretty much a disaster-though I was lined up by the 7-minute pace marker, it was the usual bottleneck-I think something really needs to be done about the starts of the NYRR races...they are always accidents waiting to happen.

The "race" itself was pretty much uneventful-I pretty much gave up trying to race in the first mile-the bad start and the elements just really got to me, so just made it a tempo run and a survival game for me-to finish without having to walk. Splits were 8:08/8:26/7:58/8:23/8:30 (mile 2 again was long and 3 was short.) Overall finished in 41:25, 8:17 pace (by my watch-didn't get a chip time.) Was very similar to my time in last fall's Poland Spring 5M which was done as my first post-injury race, but in perfect weather conditions, so I was pretty optimistic that if the weather gods would have behaved today, I would have really had a good race. Besides, I had my good race last week :) But man...I was in bad shape at the finish. I don't think I've felt that crappy after a run in quite awhile. There were bagels and fruit at the finish but I could not eat a thing. I grabbed two cups of water-one to drink and one to pour over my head-yet that refreshment was short-lived.

Afterwards...I hung around with a bunch of my male teammates (and those who read this blog can vouch for the fact that I was in bad shape after the race :-p ,) swapping war stories from the day, and getting misted by a hose that someone was nice enough to turn on for the runners. We stuck around for the raffle as well, and one of my lucky teammates won Jets tix!!

And apparently me running today wasn't a total waste besides getting a tempo run in...the Flyer women placed second among the women's teams and I was the fifth scorer for the team. Looks like they still would have gotten it even if I didn't run, but it's always nice to get a team medal-haven't gotten one of those in quite a while. So there was some good news to come out of today's race. :)

Happy Father's Day to all the dads out there...I'm off to NJ to see mine today!!

now playing: "toca's miracle" ~ fragma