This is the song that never ends...it just goes on and on my friend.

Today was the Poland Spring 5-mile Marathon kick-off run. It was the lower loop in Central Park. I had been planning on a 45 minute PR (my first 5M so anythign would be a PR :)). We got to the Park a few minutes before the start time of 9:00AM. It was cool and windy, though last night we had heard that they were predicting 25MPH winds (thankfully, they were not that bad). I had picked up the packets for the three of us last week - so we dropped off our bags and were ready to go. The start point was at Tavern on the Green - Danny and I lined up with the 9minute/mile group and Sara lined up somewhere behind us.

Danny and I ran the first mile together in about 9:30. We met up with a friend of Danny's who runs bangitout.com. He's organizing a memorial race for his father in a three weeks - if you want more information drop me a comment and I will get you in touch. We ran together for a little while. It was quite crowded and I had to focus a lot of energy on running between people. I think people just lined up and started wherever the wanted to, rather than with their pace groups. The loop in the Park was open for regular foot/bicycle traffic during the race - most people run the loop counter-clockwise, we were running it clockwise. They wanted us to stay to the right but there were so many people that we were spread out. There were a bunch of orange cones down the middle of the path and I managed to trip over one of them while talking to Danny - but I recovered and managed not to hit the ground, thankfully.

At about a mile and a half I was cutting in and out to avoid people - I put some distance between Danny and me. I didn't mean to take off, but by the time I turned around and tried to find him, I couldn't. So I just gave up - figuring that he would come zooming by me at the end just to show me up (a la New Haven). We took the 102nd street transvers, cutting out the big hill, and I looked at my garmin and noticed it said that we had reached 2 miles. I hadn't seen the 2 mile marker and it felt too early for it. Turns out somehow the garmin picked up 3/10ths of a mile and I hit the 2 mile marker around 18:30. I had gotten down to my target pace but still needed to make up about half a minute. I think the garmin was having some difficulty with all the trees, because I couldn't get a good read on pace. I passed on the water station at 2 miles, thinking I would grab a quick drink at 3 miles. I was feeling mostly good, with some mild right shin pain - but I was annoyed that I couldn't really figure out my pace. I spent most of the 3rd mile trying to catch up with my goal time of 27 minutes. I was definitely running harder than I normally do - I felt that. There was no water station at the 3rd mile - had to wait to grab a quick drink of guess what? Poland Spring water! at a little before the 4 mile marker. As I got to about 1/2 a mile left I passed a woman who was breathing really hard - I looked at her and said "We're almost there!" She smiled at me - I felt like part of a community, it was cute.

I finished in 42:11 I don't know how much more I could have run. I am really happy with that pace - gave me a 8:27 pace, but my last 3 miles were at 7:50 (roughly, it's hard to get a great estimate because my garmin was off a little and I forgot to hit the lap button). I was able to edit the run on sports tracks a little - but still only able to get it to 5.2 miles. My garmin read 5.5 when we finished. Estimated splits are below:

1 - 9:30
2 - 9:12
3 - 7:55
4 - 7:44
5 - 7:50

As Danny said - there is something really cool about the environment of a race - a certain comraderie. As we were waiting to get our medals and take our pictures I schmoozed with a girl standing next to me who's running ING next Sunday. I was talking about Philly and how there's supposedly a couple of miles of cobblestone - she told me she ran a marathon in Alaska that had 11 miles of rock. I was like wow!

We met up with a friend of Sara's who's also running ING next sunday and we got some breakfast/early lunch.

I am amazed, why do my posts end up being so long - Sara's will read something like this: "Went to Central Park to run a 5-mile race. Ran it in about 48 minutes, then went out to breakfast."But somehow mine turn into a 2 page post. But hey! no one is going to answer that question - b/c no one reads this far down into my posts.

But I was very happy with my run - felt good. Some more mileage this week. Pictures to come...