Northern Lakes 30k Pace Report

I've been dragging my feet on putting up a new blog entry lately--not for lack of material but because I've been a little busy this week. School's winding down which means getting teaching stuff wrapped up. My training for an upcoming 50k is also picking up and after my run on Saturday I'll be over 70 miles for the week. But enough with the excuses--on to the pace report.

It was pretty cool and a little rainy for the Northern Lakes 30k. The cool weather meant one thing--I got to wear my sweet Asics arm warmers. Unfortunately my fan club didn't come along so I didn't get any pictures of me looking awesome in my pacer singlet and arm warmers.

My group was the 2:29 or 8 minutes per mile group--whichever was closer. Most of the people in my group were training for an upcoming marathon--either Fargo or Minneapolis, and they all seemed to be using it as a training run. It was a nice group to run with--one gal had hurt her hamstring and she was using the run as a test run to she if she was going to be ready for the Minneapolis Marathon. It went great for her--she stayed with me for several miles and then took off on her own and finished ahead of me.

Everyone in my group was really nice and no one complained about the pace which was nice because either my Garmin wasn't doing great, or, more likely, several of the miles markers weren't in the rights spots.

The route was nice, circling a couple lakes and going through several suburban neighborhoods. The last section around Bald Eagle Lake was a little brutal--the wind was whipping right off the water blowing across our faces. A couple guys in the pace group tucked in behind me which was fine with me; it made feel like a real professional pacer.

I ran mile 17 a little quick--only one guy was with me at that point as as everyone else had either fallen back going by the lake or went on ahead. The guy who was still with me was picking it up and so I went with him until the last 1/2 mile and told him to go and finish strong. I ended up finishing in 2:29:02 and I was pretty happy with it--pretty spot on pacing.

My next pacing duty will be at the Minneapolis Marathon for Team Ortho. I'll be pacing the 3:15 group and I'm looking forward to it.

This week I had some great runs and I'm hoping to blog about one of them this weekend.