New England's Recap

Photo by Scott Mason - Coming out of the woods for the 2nd time.

This past Sunday (November 7), I took part in my second USATF-New England XC championship. Having run my best workout of the season on Tuesday (which I will post on the week recap later), I was fairly confident coming into this race to have a good finish. However, as I said last week, I knew this would be a tough race. Not only New England running is getting competitive, my club (the BAA) is getting even tougher to be in the top three. I finished 7th overall and 4th on the team in 31:10 - way out of my best of 30:18 on the course.. Although I would have liked to place higher, I am very proud of the way my teammates competed. Besides my subpart performance (which I will talk about in a second), I think everyone on the team ran well, which is very exciting as we will be in the hunt for a top finish at the USATF club nationals. The team won with a perfect score (15pts), first ever perfect score at these championships. In addition, our second pack of runners 8-14, would have also won the team competition without the top 7!

Now, back to my performance. I tried to be a little more patient than I had been at Mayor's Cup. It seemed like no one wanted to take the lead, so Luke and I were stuck near the the front. Knowing that Luke didn't want to lead either, I made a move to catch up and try to help him out near the front. Unfortunately, no other Unicorn runners came to help us. Eventually, Luke and I ended up leading the majority of the race until 7k and then things fell apart. Not sure what happened. I was still leading the race at 7.5k feeling very good going up Bearcage then all the sudden my body completely shut down. I went from running 4:50's to running 5:40's in just a matter of seconds. I thought about dropping out as I could barely move my legs, but then I decided to stay in it for the team score. I felt as if my blood sugar was extremely low like when I'm finishing one of those 22 mile long runs. I eventually slowed down so much that I was running close to 6 minute pace by the end of the race. Very embarrassing. I guess "off days" do happen to everyone. I'll have to wait until Slattery's 5 miler on Nov. 21 to redeem myself.

Results