Coming around

August 29, 2019

On August 3rd I ran the Beach to Beacon 10km in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. The race is fantastic and I highly recommend it, I had a great time. In fact, I was enjoying it so much I thought I’d take more of it in and stay out on the course a little longer (that’s a joke). I ran 30:45 for 10km and truthfully that was about 45 seconds slower than I thought I was going to run. I was rattled by my performance because I just couldn’t get it going that day. In the big picture I wasn’t too worried because I really felt I was just flat from upping my volume plus, I had another race in 3 weeks to turn the tables.

Right before the finish at Beach to Beacon. (I threw a few cups of water on myself during the race).

I started training for the Scotiabank Toronto Waterfront Marathon towards the end of July. Right before I started the build I took a few days off and went fishing with friends in Northern Ontario. As usual I crave some downtime, eating whatever and drinking beer. And then, as usual, I’m craving the hard training even more.

My second race in August was the Crim 10 Miler in Flint, Michigan. Also a very fun race, great atmosphere although not as scenic as Maine. My goal at Crim was to run a faster pace than Beach to Beacon. Luckily I found a good pack to run with so I never looked at my watch. Well, not until after 9 miles. I rolled with this chase pack, faded off from them up the hills around mile 5 and then caught back up with them. And then faded again around 8 miles to finish 14th.

I averaged 3:03/km (faster than Beach to Beacon) and ran my last two km at 3:01/km. Needless to say I was pretty happy with the way Crim went and was pleased to get the Canadian Masters record 49:13 (as long as I get the paperwork done). The nice weather at Crim certainly helped with the fast pace but more than that I was able to push into a gear that wasn’t available at Beach to Beacon. Simply getting used to 180km weeks made the biggest difference.