faster with age

     Ran the Conquer the Canyon 5K down in Smithfield this morning. This is a tough course that climbs about 250 feet up the canyon for the first half then right back down. I haven't quite been able to break 19 minutes on this course yet but came in at 19:01 last year. I have only done marathon training this spring preparing for Boston so I was curious to see how that would work in a 5k. It was a perfect morning with the temp in the lower 50s [the past 2 years it's been in the 20s and 30s] and they had a record turnout with 650 runners between the 5&10 Ks. I did a 2 mile warm up and was ready to go. The race started and I took off  and was surprised to be in 3rd place with just 2 high school aged kids ahead of me. After about a mile the first kid had a pretty good lead but the second was hanging about 30 yards ahead. I went through the first mile in 6:36. From about the first 1/2 mile we were weaving in and out of the slower 10k runners that had started 5 minutes ahead of us going up the winding canyon road. We hit the 5k turnaround and I was about 15 yards back from second place. Now we get to run back through all the 10k runners we had passed coming up and now they were mixed with 5k runners. I finished the second mile [1/2 up and 1/2 down] in 6:24 and passed the second place runner somewhere in here. The 3rd mile was all downhill and I ran it in 5:38. I ran hard the last bit but came up just short of going under 19 at 19:06 and second place overall. I thought I felt good during the race I just didn't feel like I could go faster. It probably didn't help that I haven't done any speed work until last week and very low mileage for 3 weeks tapering and recovering from Boston.

     PM Ran 6 miles easy.