Achilles St-Pat's Race Report

The weather this morning was sunny, but a bit cold (-1C) and windy (25-30 km/h). Still it was quite nice. There was a fairly large field with 1293 runners/walkers. Achilles is a non-profit organization that encourages people with disabilities to participate in running, so there was quite a few people with various disabilities. If you want a description of the course, my previous post gives an overview.

I tried to seed myself correctly, but as always, quite a few slow runners went up front and the start was a bit of a pain. It took me about 500 meters to before I could hit my pace. After that, it was smooth sailing. I felt really strong and kept passing people. I got passed by only a couple of people throughout the whole race, one of them about 10 meters from the friggin' line!

Anyway, to make a long story short, I did it. My chip time was 21:44, which is beyond my wildest expectations. I had pretty much convinced myself that I would go around 22:30, specially after getting stuck at the start. My Garmin position data is pretty much useless because I was running downtown, but I'm positive I ran negative splits with a second half about 1 minute faster than the first.

The race was sponsored by Steamwhistle, a beer company, so we got a free beer (and chili) after the race. That really hit the spot!

Stats:

Place: 125/1293
Gun Time: 22:10
Chip Time: 21:44
Category: Men 40-49
Cat Place: 30/142
Gender Place: 107/538

According to my training program, this now gives me a VDOT of 45, three notches above my current VDOT of 42. My new training paces are: EPace: 5:46/km, TPace: 4:38/km and IPace: 4:16/km. I don't do repetitions yet, so they don't matter for now. My next quality workout will be crazy hard.

My next race is in two weeks. It's the April Fool's 10K, in Whitby. According to my VDOT chart, I might be able to crack 45 minutes, which would be demented.