Goat ’09? Rocked It!

For the first race in a long time, I feel that my training investment really showed some dividends.  In addition to keeping fairly active over the winter (mostly running and weights at the Planet Fitness down the street) and a somewhat unprecedented 6 full course trainging runs (including some in hellaciously crappy weather), I was able to pull in a fantastic 71:09!

Here’s the stats breakdown:

• 71:09 is a 7:08/mile pace.  That amazes me.  I can honestly say that I didn’t feel like I was going that fast.  I think that doing a bunch of speedwork on the treadmill helped the most in this area.
• If you’ve been following my tweets, you seen that I’ve been incrementally improving my time over the training runs.  I thought I was doing pretty good with 75:12 last Saturday.  A race day improvement of 4:03 was mind boggling.
• Using the Mountain Goat’s website, I tracked down my previous PR, 80:26 in ’07 (missed the ’08 race due a work emergency.)  Whoa, that’s a PR improvement of 9:19.

Even with the rather hilly training route that I use for my dailies, I don’t think they’re a good substitute for the real race course.  Pounding up Stolp, to the peak of Onondaga Park, slogging up Colvin, and the final major climb in Thorden Park, are the only real ways to get ready for race day.  I was able to charge up Thorden hill with far less reservation than in the past.

The Goat certainly isn’t the Boilermaker yet (though I’m pretty much required to say that being a native Utican), but I’m happy to see that its growing every year.  The real way to tell how well a race is doing is to watch the spectators; not the ones and the start or finish (those people are there to support their running family and friends), but those folks out in the middle of the course, who’s houses you run by (or those you block in their driveways.)  It was great to see more support in the middle of course that I’ve seen before.  I was particularly touched by all the nice comments from the church bound families in their Sunday finery on Landon Ave.

Job well done and many thanks to all who do all hard work to put a great race day experience together, including:

• the Mountain Goat Organizers – I should really try to help out more (beyond running the volunteer sign up page.)
• Syracuse Police – thanks for keeping us safe out there and calming all the folks who were gonna be late to church because of the blocked roads.
• Syracuse Track Club – thanks for keeping everybody interested and yelling at everybody to mind their road manners out on the training runs.

With the Goat in the bag, I’m gearing up for the Hall of Fame Half Marathon in Utica in 2 weeks.  I think I’m in pretty good shape, but I plan to bang out some long miles on the Erie Canal trails to get my legs used to stone dust trails again.  After that, I don’t have any race booked until the Boilermaker, though I may throw in some random 5k’s (Paiges) or 10k’s (Swamp Rat, F’ville) as the budget allows.