At mile 8 of this race, I concluded that I would never again wonder about the origin of the word "hill" in the name Chapel Hill. We all knew from the profile that it was coming and when you drop around 300 feet from mile 7-8, you know that there is only one way back to the finish ... but somehow this previous knowledge did not do the hill justice. Not suprisingly, I kept thinking about Grandfather Mountain during this portion of the race. Fortunately, the hill only lasted a mile at which point you simply had to hold on to the finish. But back to the beginning.
My training for the last several weeks has been going really well and my A-goal was to go out at around 6:06 pace and see if I could finish around 1:01. Unfortunately, I went to a reception the evening before and then spent part of the night wondering which of the hors d'oeuvres had salmonella. Fortunately, that passed pretty quickly but I was still not feeling great at the race start.
The second surprise was that the first 7 miles were not as flat as the profile seemed to indicate which may have been due to the size of the hill from 7-9 miles. Once I settled in, I found that despite not feeling really good, I was maintaining or running faster than my goal pace and I started feeling better as the race progressed. This race actually had a 6 minute pace leader, who I knew was a masters, and I kept him in sight throughout the race but, unfortunately, I could never catch him. In the end, I was within 20 seconds of my A-goal which, given the course and crazy night before, I was extremely happy about.
This race has a lot of potential but also had some issues this year. The first was the course layout which included a merge with the main pack and then diverging turn at around mile 6. This was very chaotic and led to some of the top runners being misdirected off course. Secondly, the race coordinators had a lot of trouble tabulating the final results due to folks switching races and a large number of malfunctioning chips. Hence correct results were not available until late the next day. These problems are both fixable and hopefully they will be eliminated next year.
The weather was absolutely perfect for the race and there were a number of spectacular performances. John Crews won in an amazing time of 49:02, Amy Kelly had an outstanding race as first overall female, and great job to Jennifer Curtin who won the Masters Female!
