5 Peaks race #5, Albion Hills

And so it ends. Race 5 of the series went on Saturday morning at 10:00 AM. Sunshine and pleasant running temps met all at the Albion Hills Conservation area park. There was a half marathon event that preceded the enduro and sport runs, but had a bit of a hiccup as runners blew through the first (unmanned) turn and ended up running in the wrong direction. A few of the runners switched to sport and enduro to get something in that day. The later races were directed properly at the first turn and went on hitchless.

As I was in a tie for second place, I made the effort to spot my counterpart (although I only had a vague idea of what he looked like) at the start. A runner in wave two looked about as close as I was going to find so I opted to go in the front of that wave to be in the same general area. I had one of two plans going in; plan A) find him and stick with him no matter what; plan B) run my race and hope it holds up. I settled on a hybrid, sticking close enough to keep him in sight but not at the risk of toasting my own effort.

The hybrid approach worked out well. As counterpart weaved in and out of traffic and laid down some hard sprints to get ahead, I made moves when necessary (i.e. runner ahead too slow) but kept the effort down enough to sustain me through the race. This was not a technically difficult course, but demanding in terms of hills as they seemed relentless. Somewhere around 4k I spotted him having to walk a portion of a hill, and about half way I passed him as he had to walk an entire long hill. It may have been that the course turned out tougher than he expected, or maybe he just plain overdid it early. At any rate, once I made the pass halfway I was pretty well clear to the end.

I think my training went well on this one. Not the max I could have done, but I stayed consistent and didn't enter any lax periods. One particularly hard workout a couple of weeks before the race stuck in my head as having contributed to my readiness. It was midweek, I had a vacation day, and did a nearly 2 hour run down to the beach, over to the water treatment plant, and and executed a half hours worth of steep hill climbs (about 20 odd iterations). I needed to make sure my calves and quads would be in shape for this race so really wanted to run that hill as I would on race day.

I also kept to my plan, with 2 hour long runs every Sunday, hills sprinkled in, and some good solid tempo efforts. At work I have an 8k and 10k route I can follow and made a point of doing a solid tempo on Friday's doing an easy/moderate out 5k leg and a hard 5k leg back. These 5k return legs were done in 22:08, 22:16 and 21:20 over the preceding few weeks. The leg is downhill though so the numbers would be slower on flat, but solid efforts nonetheless.

In the end, I took 3rd in my age group for the race and 2nd a/g for the series.

This is an excellent series to run. There's some hitches here and there, big courses and difficult to arrange, but from a runner's perspective...pretty darn good. I think I'll be back next year, either that or the year after. I'm in good running shape right now and still focusing on more stuff this year.