First day of the Del Sol Relay. After sleeping not so good we all headed over to Lybi's house to hang out and wait for our time to depart to the start of the Del Sol Relay. We met up with the rest of the team at the start of the race in Wickenburg, AZ and hung out waiting for the race to start. We started at 6:00pm with 5 other teams which was the last start time. The first teams started at 9:00am. I will let everyone else comment on their specific legs but I was in van #2 with Adam, Kory, Sasha, Jeff and Steve. I was really concerned that I was not going to be able to run anywhere close to my predicted times and was very concerned that I would struggle to run even close to 6:00 pace. Besides the fact that I have not been able to hardly run at all the last month I came down with the flu last weekend and my throat had not recovered and I was feeling pretty trashed overall. I really did not want to let the team down so I was pretty nervous about how my body would respond and perform. So when it was my turn to run at about 9:00pm I was not very excited but I was determined to not let anyone down. So I took the hand off from Adam, who ran very fast, and just tried to relax and tell myslef to run hard and just kept pushing thinking to myself to just push no matter what and at least make it through one leg with a decent time and try and be as close to my predicted time as possible. My first leg was suppossed to be 4 miles with the first 2 fairly flat and the last 2 on a slight uphill. The total distance measured short at 3.85 miles. The toughest part about this leg was teh fact that there was 3 cattle guards and crossing cattle guards at night running sub 6:00 pace is a little scary. My first mile was 5:48 which was 12 seconds ahead of predicted pace so I was happy and although not feeling goo just focused on pushing and trying to stay ahead of pace as long as possible. The 2nd mile was a 5:38 and now I was 34 seconds ahead of pace and glad I had put a cushion before starting the climb. This is where the real climb began and to top it off I turned into a pretty decent headwind. This made things hurt and the 3rd mile was a 6:19 but I was still 15 seconds ahead of predicted and hanging on. The last split was 5:04 for .85 miles which is just under 6:00 pace so I ended up with 22:51 for 3.95 miles and about 15 seconds ahead of predicted pace wise and 1:09 ahead of actual predicted time. I handed off to Kory and jumped back in the van. At this point I was not sure how the rest of the night would go as I was feeling wiped out and my throat was killing me. The knee survived but it was a bit stiff after getting out of the van and walking around and jogging at the next exchange. So my next leg was after midnight so you can read about it on my next days entry. | 