got a comp courtesy of my friend who is the CFO of the race sponsor. Great race on a challenging course. Training has been spotty, I forgot my garmin, and it was cold and windy so I wasn't really planning on doing more than trying to finish this in under 90 minutes. But fortunately I found blogger Chad at the starting line. He had his garmin and told me he was going for under 1:25, so I decided to hook up with him as far as I could. We decided to take turns breaking the strong south wind, by switching the lead every half mile or so. Chad ended up doing more of the wind breaking than me, maybe due to something he ate the night before? Lame attempt at joke. Anyway it was nice to have someone to run with and keep me motivated, and not to worry about the pace since he took care of that with his garmin. He would take the lead on the hills, but I managed to catch him again up until about mile 10 when he started to gap me and finished 30 or so seconds ahead of me, nice job Chad. I felt surprisingly good for this race considering really spotty training and less than ideal conditions. I shaved more than two minutes off last year's time in this race despite being in worse shape and worse weather? Maybe I will continue to prepare for races by not training as hard?
Anyway, this has become one of my favorite Utah races- great organization, challenging honest loop course, great group of runners, awesome volunteers, and cool new wagon wheel trophies three deep in all age groups. And timed by runnercard, who always does a great job.
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