Arkansas 20k

ow, ow, ow..........This one ranks 3rd for me behind the Hogeye 1/2 Marathon and Sara Low 5k for tough courses. Hilly and lots of places where the road had a wicked tilt. I'm achy right now and hobbling around when I do pry my butt up off the couch. As a result I just placed an order for some compression socks to help with recovering after these tough races and runs. I went with the CEP Socks because a twitter friend works for them. Not exactly the most attractive things but hey if they work, I'll be ecstatic!


Race report--Eugene told me beforehand that it was going to be tough and I'd already read some other reviews along the same lines. Since I had an 18 mile long run to get done, I just decided to start out much slower than usual and use this as a supported training run. Great news was that it was overcast with just an occasional light drizzle, no overheating from the sun and no downpours. Almost perfect, yay!


I was sooooo happy to see that Brenda, Cindy, and Lisa decided to race! Missed them last weekend. Now I knew there wouldn't be any keeping up with Lisa but on good days I can keep up with Brenda and Cindy. Those two decided to take off a tad faster than what I wanted so I ran with Tala on the first half (plus a bit). She's great company too and a darn good runner :).


After the first half, Tala was taking a walk break to get some water and I noticed that B & C had slowed down just a bit from their blistering initial pace along with Karen so I sped up just a bit to catch up with them. Ran with K. for quite a bit then took a walk break so I could ingest a gel and that's when C. caught back up to me with a group of guys. Had another great mile or two then it seemed like survival mode kicked in, that's when we started back with the bigger hills :(. It was just try and keep moving at that point.


Oh to back up just a bit, K. and I ran with a guy for a while that had 35 marathons and several Ironman Tris under his belt. Amazing! I'm just hoping to survive my first, lol.


Garmin splits
Mile 1 8:56
Mile 2 8:38
Mile 3 8:41
Mile 4 8:50
Mile 5 9:01
Mile 6 8:58
Mile 7 8:36
Mile 8 8:21
Mile 9 8:50
Mile 10 9:25
Mile 11 9:10
Mile 12 8:56
Mile 12-12.49 3:59



So no negative splits but not too inconsistent either. I'm happy with it and since this is my first 20k race it was going to be a personal record regardless of my time.


Chip time 1:50:18 (garmin time 1:50:28)
75/179 overall (Male and Female)
16/77 Female overall


And I came home with this--thought I might place today because it's a smaller race but knew it wouldn't be master's and thought it would be further down so I'm very pleased :). Especially since I didn't set out to race race today.






















Tala by the way needed some extra mileage too so we kept each other company for another 4.5-4.75 miles AFTER the race. Did I mention it was hilly? Big day, my first 20k and almost 18 miler (17.99!).