2016 Beat the Bridge 8K Race Report

It's been a month since the Boston Marathon and it felt great today to be back racing the JDRF Nordstrom Beat the Bridge 8K in Seattle.    This was the 8th time I've run this race with a 34:08 PR in 2010 with race times the three years of 35:58 (2014), 35:39 (2015), and 35:41 (2016).   I was happy with today's result placing 12/142 in my age bracket and 239th out of nearly 2,000 runners.   

I wasn't entirely sure what to expect today after taking a week off from Boston and then following up with a couple of solid 40-mile training weeks before heading off to Mexico the week before last for seven days.   Although I ran five of the seven days on vacation (I didn't run on the travel days) including a 22:41 5K on the resort treadmill, I was fairly sure the vacation was going to slightly derail what would've possibly been a better race time this morning.    I've never run well coming off of vacation when it comes to racing.   

Coming out of the Boston Marathon unscathed and finally healed up from a nagging lower right leg tendon injury from January, I've finally been able to string together a month of workouts where I've been able to blend in tempo, interval and long runs all within a seven day training cycle without any pain (and it seems like it's been forever since I trained and wasn't in some level of pain leading up to Boston).   

Preparing mentally for this morning's race, my son Ethan and I have a fun pre-race ritual we've enjoyed the last couple of years together. The night before the race, we jot down our anticipated split times for the next morning's race.  It's a simply way to think about how we plan to run the race and talk a little racing strategy before actually going out and running the race.   The scribbles below are what I wrote down last night depicting my actual splits from the 2015 race, planned splits for this morning's race followed by my actual splits this morning.   

  

The story of this morning's race is I've gained a lot of speed coming out of the marathon, but anything approaching even a minor hill climb (such as the first 400 meters of mile three in this race) really causes me to fade.  I think this is a function of being unable to do any hill training leading to Boston due to my injury as well as still having just a bit of residual marathon fatigue which shows up on hills.    

In fact, my pace on mile three over the University Bridge today was fading towards a 7:50 split before I got off the bridge and made up time over the remaining 1000 meters of mile three and got back down to 7:29 expending a lot of energy with sapped me a bit on mile four.    

I was actually ahead of my race time last year until the final ~1500 meters running it in 6:51 vs. 6:41 in last year's race.   I thought I ran a strong closing stretch but again the slight uphill over the last few hundred meters before it flattens out over the final 100 meters probably did me in.    

Snapshot from the race from Strava 

In summary I had some mini PR's over the course of the race running a two-mile stretch in just over 14:00 minutes which I was quite happy with.    

Me and my 17 year old son Ethan who ran a 32:08 this morning, leaving me in the dust with an opening mile of 5:57.

 Next up for me is likely the June 18 Seattle Rock-n-Roll Half Marathon.    With 4+ training weeks remaining I'm hoping I can leverage some of the great aerobic base from all the Marathon training and get some good threshold and tempo work in that gives me a competitive time.  The course was changed this year so that the closing 1/2 mile is now mostly downhill vs. dead uphill which I'm sure a lot of runners complained about.       Last year I ran it in 1:39:20.   I'll be pleased with anything sub 1:39 and elated for anything sub 1:37 although some of the hills along the route will make this tough.