I ran the Las Vegas 5k this morning. The race had been advertised on letsrun.com, and there was a $1000 prize for first place, with money going 5 deep so competition was expected to be pretty good. I ran a 5 mile warm-up before the race started and added in a few strides to get my legs moving a bit. The weather was as good as I can expect for Las Vegas as wind was blowing between 10-15mph from the Southwest, and temperatures were in the 60-70 degree range. The course itself has a lot of turns, so I was not expecting a blazing time for the winner, but I figured that it would still be pretty fast as it is flat, and there was good competition. The race started, and a few guys took off at an insane pace. I had to remind myself to not push the pace too hard and I held back, running what felt super comfortable for the first few hundred meters. Eventually, all of the insane sprinters dropped off pace, and the fastest of us settled into a pack, with one beastly looking guy sporting dreadlocks dropping all of us like it was nothing. This guy was something else, as physically he did not look the part of an elite distance runner, having wide muscular looking shoulders versus the emaciated look that you almost expect to see from top distance runners, yet he smoked the field putting a fairly large gap on all of us by the time we hit the mile mark (the mile marks were all off, so no splits today). I was still within striking distance of the guy in second just past the mile mark, but at that point he started to pull away from the pack leaving a group of 5 guys (myself included) to fight for the last 3 money spots in the race. It was just past this point that the race started to go south for me. Before we were a mile and a half into the race I started to feel a pain and tightness in my chest, and I felt like my breathing was being constricted. I was still able to maintain contact with the pack, but I felt like I had no ability to really compete with these guys. I can't say that I reacted well to the adversity either, as mentally I kind of gave up. During the third mile another guy passed me (pushing me back into 8th place) and over the last half mile the pack slowly pulled away from me (I was still within contact of the 3rd place finisher until then). I finished the race in 15:24, good for 8th place (the winner finished in 14:30). I am not sure exactly how far back I was from 3rd, but it was not too much. I feel like on a better day I would have been able to stay with those guys, but I just didn't have "it" today. After I finished I could barely stand up because the pain in my abdomen just about made me keel over. My legs didn't feel too bad, I just felt like I didn't have the ability today to push myself to my full capacity today. Overall, I am a little disappointed that I did not finish better than I did, but to put things in perspective this was a tune-up race, nothing more. Considering the conditions, and whatever it was that happened to my abdomen (maybe something I ate?), the time wasn't that bad, and considering that this was just a pre-marathon tune up, I was happy with the effort and the workout that I got in. If I came across as negative in this post that was mostly unintentional, as I honestly was not that upset with the sub par performance, as my focus race for the spring is coming up next Saturday at the Illinois Marathon, and I really don't have the time to dwell on a sub par performance at a little 5k.
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