Eldora 10K Race Report

So this race is called The Eldora 11K but I refuse to call it that since it seems silly when the course today was 5.8 miles by my Garmin.  This morning I rode up with Connie, my coach who also ran the race, on  really cool post rain gorgeous morning.  I have had a really light week and it showed in my warmup, I felt really good and was ready to run.  The race director said the course was really muddy, and everybody seemed excited.  The likes of Bernie Boetcher, Megan Kimmel and others really love the more technical runs.  My goal was to finish in top 25 and as the race started I took the first climb pretty aggressively, thinking that I was pretty confident I would have plenty of time to recover.  There was indeed lots of flat running during miles 2 and 3, at least by my standards, and I had plenty of time to recover.  After several weeks of running Boulder’s Peaks I was actually hoping for some more climbing but this course was very rolling.  But it was really fun just to let it all out.  The miles went by pretty fast and I fell in behind a Master LaSportiva female runner, never someone to underestimate.  I felt I could catch her and I did on an uphill along with one other guy.  The course turned really technical and fun for the second 1/2 of the course.  We ran through 1 foot of muddy water for 25 yards then raced through the woods in an ad hoc course that involved really tight turns and log hopping, with steep short climbs, really exciting stuff.   I started to put some time on the 2 people behind me in this section.  I also nearly blew a gasket at one point but I hung on recovered and finished strong for a time of 47 minutes and change.  I finished 29th, missing my goal of top 25.  Last year I ran 6.1 miles in 50 minutes at about the same pace, with a course with 1000 more feet of vertical, finishing in 35th in a bigger field.  So I really didn’t show much if any improvement this year although I felt a lot stronger, probably because of a better taper.  Overall, I felt like I ran a really solid race, I had great self-talk and kept a strong cadence.  I was strongest on the hills late in the course where I managed to pass a few people.  My weakness was not having the raw speed in the flat sections, something I should work on by running some flatter faster intervals on the trails perhaps.  

Here is my Garmin report.

Afterwards Matt Hill was kind enough to run with me for a 10 minute cool down.  I talked briefly with the winner, Ryan Hafer, from CO Springs who was about as down to earth as you could ever hope for.   He won in 36 minutes!   I then watched some other amazing athletes, including my friend Cody Waits go at in the Eldora Xterra.  I love that sport, it was gnarly and cool and I am starting to learn about the top guys and girls.  They are all really friendly people and I stayed around until the afternoon for Avery Beer and pizza and some good live music.