There have been very few chances to race this year so I've tried to take advantage of any opportunities. The Jingle Bell 5k in Manchester. This would be another event managed by Millennium racing and would feature the time trial start format. The time trial format has each runner starting 10 seconds apart. Start order is based on your seeding time. This has meant that from time to time a sandbagger will start well back in order to have people to pass (and the opportunity to beat people who never know they are back there). I've been seeding myself at the fast end of what I thought I could do figuring it someone caught me that'd be incentive to try to go with them. I checked out the course the week before and it would be fast, maybe not super-fast as you had a couple of 90 degree turns climbing/descending to the bridge over the Merrimack river and as it was an out/back course you'd do a 180 around a cone. It was also just ever so slightly (10 seconds?) long of 5k. I seeded myself at 18:30 and hoped I might be able to go as fast as 18:15 which would be my fastest time this year.
I had a good workout mid-week including a 5:36 mile and felt I was ready to go on Saturday. I arrived a little early to give myself plenty of time, got my number and headed out to run the course again. I felt tired and quite nervous. I switched into racing gear and did another easy mile before heading to the start line. I was seeded 5th so there was only a 40 second wait after the start and I was off. I tried to be cautious the first half mile that included the 30' of climb up to the bridge. I was working pretty hard and hoping I wasn't going out too fast. I missed the 1/2 mile split on my watch. From the half to the mile I reeled in the 4th seed and passed him as I hit the mile in 5:48 which was about where I'd hoped to be. I did a little calculating as the top 3 guys came back towards me and knew I'd lost a lot of ground on them. I also did some math on Mark Laprade who'd started 10 seconds behind me and was pretty sure I was holding my place. I hit 2 miles in 11:32, but had trouble reading my watch and thought it was 11:42. I was hurting but tried to work the slight downhill. A lot of the people yelled out encouragement which was nice. I never saw my 3 mile split and pushed to the line pretty sure I took 4th place. I was disappointed when I looked at my watch and saw "18:14". It wasn't until after I'd done the course again for a warm-down and looked at the results to find that my watch actually read "18:04"! I was shocked to see my official time was 18:02.5. Damn! I'd just missed breaking 18. This was my fastest (non-downhill) time at 5k since September of 2018.
Definitely pleased with the result and looking forward to hitting the track sometime in the next few weeks to take a shot at breaking 18.
Bib number is your seed so you can compare that to a persons place to see who was sandbagging...
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