I really enjoyed the weekend at Thanksgiving Point with my family. I thought it was great that the race packet included two flex passes that admitted you into all of the venues at Thanksgiving Point. We spend the day yesterday taking the kids to the farm, ancient life museum, and the gardens. We then stayed at the Marriott at Thanksgiving Point because I had an e-certificate that I needed to use by June. I woke up at about 5:45 so I could get some breakfast in me and take care of business on the toilet. I was nervous this morning because I couldn't go near as much as I normally do on race mornings and thought that I was going to need to stop in the race. Luckily that was not an issue. I ran about a 2.5 mile warm-up and did some strides and then some of the heavy hitters started showing up at the starting line. There was Brett, Jon K, Jace, Scott K., Jon H. I knew then that it was going to be very difficult to win some cash. We headed out in a pack with Brett leading the way through the first mile. After the mile marker Brett picked up the pace considerably and Jon K. was the only one to go with him. I started to go with him but quickly decided the pace was too heavy for me to handle, so I dropped back and joined Jace and Scott. Somewhere partway into that mile Scott started dropping off which surprised me, but I later learned that he was battling some calf issues and ultimately ended up dropping out of the race (sorry Scott!) Jace and I stayed close to each other through 3 miles. Then I gapped him just a little. The gap stayed minimal for a while so I decided to let him catch up with me so we could work together, hoping that we might eventually catch up with Jon who we could see was falling off of Brett at this point. Jace and I stayed close and worked together and I think we closed the gap a little bit on Jon over through 7.5-8 miles then Jace started to gap me. He gapped me by about 20 meters at one point and then I decided I really needed to work hard to get back up there with him soon or I was going to get dropped so I really worked hard over the next mile to get back up to him. In the mean time Jon was opening his large gap on us again and I knew we weren't going to get him so it was going to be a tough battle between me and Jace for 3rd place and the $150.00. It was at about mile 9 that I finally caught back up to Jace. When I pulled up next to him he suggested that we make thing much more pleasant on each other and agree to split the $150 evenly and run the last 4 miles together so we could both ease up a little and not have to duke it out with each other. Having just made a big move to catch him I was more than happy to agree to the deal knowing that after a big move like that I wasn't going to have much in me to battle over the final 4 miles. So we cruised in together and determined from about 3 miles out that we wouldn't race until the final turn which only left about 75-100 meters. I thought for sure Jace would have no problem outkicking me because anybody that knows Jace knows that he has some wheels! However, today I was really able to get rolling and actually outkicked Jace, barely. Overall, it was a really fun race. I loved how pretty it was and I was super impressed with how Kendall Wimmer put on the race and how he catered to the elite runners. I definitely would like to make this race an annual tradition. My mile splits were all over the place but that is to be expected on a course like this one. Those of you that have run the course know what I mean. They were as follows: 5:24, 5:27, 5:10, 5:22, 6:05, 5:08, 5:34, 5:41, 5:36, 5:31, 5:50, 5:45, 6:6:05 (for last 1.1). After the race I ran back up to the hotel and did my cool down on the hotel treadmill because it was so wet outside.
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