We woke up this morning to several new inches of snow on the ground. As we made our way to the race at Chattfield State Park it was clear that the plows had not made it down the freeway so it was slow going. Arriving at the race site it was snowing pretty heavily and the winds were blowing the snow around. The parking lot was slippery as it had several inches of snow on top of a sheet of ice. Luckily the race course was in much better conditions.
4 minutes before the race my shoelace on my Salomon shoes broke. I had to run back to the car, switch shoes, switch my YakTracks to my new shoes and whoosh...off I went. The course was rather hilly with several inches of snow covering it, but the YakTracks gave me great traction. They had lots of slow ups and slow downs. At the turn around I counted that I was in 3rd place (for the ladies). Mile 4 was an especially hard mile for me, slightly uphill. A lady passed me, and she was running really strong past me, so I let her go. I just tried to keep my pace and continue to go hard. I finished as the 4th lady, my time was 40:55.
I felt good about it. I stayed on about an 8:12 pace for the 5 miles. The last 5K I ran a pace of 7:58 so I felt this was pretty good given the conditions and the 2 extra miles over a 5K. The next race in the series is in a month and it's a 10 mile. That seems like a really long distance, so I am going to have to put in some longer runs to train for that one.
I got some major swag at this race. I won a $15 gift cert from a local running store for getting third place in my age category, and the guy representing Accelerade was there and he gave me a free tub of it (like a $20 value) and a t-shirt and a water bottle. Accelerade is a recovery drink that has a 4:1 carb to protein ratio...but that's a blog for another day.