New PR today at St. George Marathon. I was able to run it 8 minutes faster than
Deseret News in late July. The
conditions were some of the best they have had in recent years, although it was
still warmer than I prefer. Several PR
by running friends also some tough crashes.
After a week working in Vegas and someone stealing my racing
Hokas out of my car, I was glad to get back into Utah on Thursday night. I worked from the hotel on Friday and continued
my beet juice “loading” experiment. Met
the group Friday evening at a Lloyd and Jan Hanson’s house for pasta and made
some race plans. I had an A+ goal of
2:45 with good conditions and a more realistic goal of sub 2:50; however,
things went better than planned.
Got off the bus at the start and it was warm, but a good
5-10 mph trail wind was blowing. This
was a huge help the first ½ of the race before it dissipated. I ran the first few miles with my training
partner, Craig (ran 2:40 PR), before he left me at the base of Veyo while I was
talking with Stephen Anderson. Since it’s
such a rare event for me to run with Stephen, I really enjoyed it. Oddly, the was his first St. George. We ran together several miles before I
decided to make a push up to the 2nd place girl, Annie. We ran most of Deseret News together. Ran with Annie briefly before deciding to try
and catch Amber Green, the overall female winner.
I came through the ½ at about 1:22-it was a little faster
than I wanted but felt very comfortable.
At this point Amber picked up the pace.
For the rest of the race I attempted to reel her in, but she ran really
strong with a ton of crowd support-a lot of solo running for me from here on
out.
I was able to negative split the course with a 1:21 on the
back side. My pace stayed fairly strong
with my last mile being my slowest (6:34)-other than Veyo. I never had an urge to walk and finished with
a big smile. I also had to have nice
kick at the end to hold off James Blackham.
He and I are always pretty close with him usually getting the better of
me in the marathons. It was nice to be passing people the last 5K for a change.
My week of nitrate loading on beet juice really made a
difference. The lab testing shows a 3-5%
increase in performance. I’m skeptical
if 6 days of loading is necessary simply due to the science behind it, but I
believe 10-20 ounces 15 minutes before a run would provide the necessary
nitrate for your system. The conditions
at St. George were good, but my effort was not as high as DesNews just 2 months
ago. Breathing was easy and muscles felt
relaxed throughout the race. I’m definitely
a believer in the stuff and will continue to use it until it gets banned-lol!
Lots of bloggers at race and nice to talk to everyone. Funny thing: 35th overall yet 12th
in my age group--where did all these old fast people come from!
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