Mike Bromberek ran the Pumpkin Festival 10K, finishing this distance in the time of 45:45.
Was fun running with friends and hanging out with them after the race. Was warmer weather making it a harder race but was able to keep going and push hard at the end.
During first mile tried to avoid going to fast and stay around 7m10s per mile. Sped up a little after the first mile since as running with a friend then. When watch went off for the end of the 3rd mile I saw my average Heart Rate for that mile was 155 which I did not think mine can really be higher than that for a long amount of time so was feeling hard then and knew I should not try to push to go much faster at this point.
About 4.5 miles into the race turned onto a road that had a pretty strong headwind that caused me to slow down during the second half of 5th mile and some of the 6th. After getting out of the wind I was able to speed up and really push it during the last quarter of a mile.
Christina Kach ran the Tunnel Light Half Marathon and finished with a time of 1:54:14. This was a PR by 1 minute and 49 seconds!
Finally felt more like myself again. I felt on race day like I want to feel on race day. Healthy, capable, good mindset. The race got hard around mile 10-11 and I managed to stay strong – especially after a shaky start. I felt like I was really locked into 9:15 in the first mile of the race, and was really rattled to see 9:30. It got even worse at mile 2 – I had made sure not to weave at all, and I hit 2 before the marker – and had another longer than pace plan mile. Hit 3 and was another slow one and was already .10!? over. And I only went around 2 people. And running the tangents were hard – it had been raining all night (and all morning, and all race) so there were lots of deep puddles to avoid (or try to). I had managed to stay mostly dry before the race started which was very good. And the paths were not the packed gravel they showed on the website, it was soft and rather loose gravel. I had to really think about my footing, It was really hard already being off pace by a full minute at mile 3. I knew going too fast to make up for this early would backfire, so I just tried to stay steady to the miles 4-10 of the plan as best I good and hope I could speed up at the final 5K. And it wasn’t until the mile 9 marker were I was finally pack on track to get PR. Picking people off actually worked this race – normally that doesn’t work for me. And I really locked in on the final 2 miles, and just pushed. Slow start was a little bittersweet because today could have possibly been faster. But in the moment I was SO happy to get that big PR. Course was beautiful – rich green trees, fog, waterfall, a black bear who luckily wasn’t hungry. And thank goodness for no sunshine and 42 degrees because the humidity was still 100 and I could feel it still.
