Kevin showed up to the track and cheerily notified Terry, Neil, and me that his car's temperature gauge read 96 degrees. I bumped into Joe as well, who has run more than his fair share of warm weather races, and he made a good observation that the track didn't seem to be giving off heat. So, at least we weren't running on blacktop and roasting from every direction.
As for the race...
Looking at the splits, I went out at an ok pace. I wasn't really far off the leaders after the first lap, and there were two clear leaders and two chase packs that formed. I was maybe 2 seconds back at 400, then at 600 the gap really started to widen. The second pack started to split up and string out already. I was pretty tempted to surge forward into the first pack and maybe even make sure that there wasn't a huge separation between that pack and the leaders, but I decided against it. I had started to sweat a lot already, and not closing the gap wasn't really a conscious decision, but it was one of those situations where - if I surged that early, I would have paid dearly and I'm sure that I knew it.
I didn't think the first pack was out of reach though and I tried to just increase my pace and close the gap steadily and see how that went. I followed up the second lap with an 1:21 and an 1:22, passing the mile in 5:30. I ended up in no man's land behind the first pack, and slowly started to find the pace that my legs would be capable of handling. I'm disappointed that was around 1:28 per quarter, but this ended up being an "it is what it is" pace. The temps were warm, but I was more concerned with the humidity. I was pouring water on my head, and using the sponges on the back of my neck, and I could tell that nothing was evaporating. So, there was no cooling effect from either my sweat or the water.
In retrospect, there is the chance that I could've run one more quick lap to start hanging on to the back of the chase pack. However, I saw some guys step off the track and I get the feeling that they were all trying to hang on at just too quick of a pace. Even though it was very windy, no mans land didn't seem like that big of a deal at that glacial pace, so there I stayed.
There were a few familiar faces and I was able to focus on them in that swampy middle section of the race, and I trusted my instinct to let them pull away, knowing/hoping they would come back. And they did. I finished with a steadily quicker final lap, that served no real purpose. I thought I was surging to catch a runner, but I was actually lapping him. So, I wasn't catching anyone and no one was catching me. Oh well, finishing a race strong is better than jogging it in. Final time was 36:09. A suffer-fest.
Race Video
Results
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