AM - Easy 5-mile pre-race morning run with Clyde and Dave. Pace around 7:30/mile. Similar route to last night. (Adrenaline orange: 167 miles)
8 PM - My first leg of Relay del Sol (Leg 5). Borrowed Sasha's Garmin and warmed up for 1 mile. Since AZ doesn't do daylight savings, it was quite dark by this time. Temperatures were in the low 60's, and very little wind. Dan came in to the exchange and we had a clean handoff, and I took off. I basically wanted this to be a good threshold run. The leg started on a gentle downhill, and I did the first half mile in 2:30, 5:08 for the first mile. Everything felt very good, and I could feel the lower elevation difference. There was a gentle climb from Mile 1.5 to Mile 3.5, and my pace slowed to 5:30/mile on this stretch, but still felt very strong. From 3.5 to the finish (5.8), I had a nice gentle downhill, and I opened it up along this stretch and averaged 5:00/mile, including a 4:58 mile near the end. Average pace for the overall leg was 5:15/mile. I was very pleased with this, as I felt like I could have kept going at this pace for another 5 miles or so. Good start to the relay. Cooled down about a half mile afterwards.
Team-wise, at this point we were running very well. Dave, Clyde, Dan, Jon, and I all exceeded our projected paces by quite a bit, and Sasha was right on his projected pace. We started the race with 4 teams in our wave (the other 70 teams started in waves earlier in the morning and afternoon), and it became apparent after the first couple legs that it would be a two-team race between ourselves and Google; the other two teams were way back. Google, however was putting distance on us with most of their runners. They have a very good team, including a 3:39 1500m runner who has run Oly trials. They also had very nice matching warmups and uniforms. We had a scruffy-looking bunch of people and a van without working doors. It had all the makings of a really bad sports movie. To be continued. (Burn: 84 miles)
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