Well I have been on night shift for the past couple of weeks now and had previously signed up for this race thinking that I was off the night after the race. I was hoping to get out of work a little early and be able to sleep a couple hours prior to the race, but like the past race I tried to attend the crazy Chongger up North decided to ruin my plans. This time I decided I can't have my life controlled by some crazy guy up North and would go crazy if I kept missing races.
I ended up not getting out of work early and still had to work the night when I got back from the race. The race was on Sunday at 10 am. Saturday I had got up at noon to get out for a 3 hour group ride with the guys which departed at 1. Upon arriving back to base I headed into work from 1800-0600 and then came home and packed up to head up to Seoul for the race. A new girl here runs for the AF Cross Country Team and AF Marathon team and it was going to be her first race in Korea. I was waiting at Starbucks for her and sure enough she slept through her alarm. Luckily I plan accordingly for these kinds of things when traveling with anyone else to races, especially females ;)
About 30 minutes later than expected we departed for our adventure up to Seoul. Two train transfers later and we were right at the race start, it was literally right outside the train stop. It was a cold morning with temps down in the low 30's. The course was an out and back along the han river. There was still some spots of snow/ice which made for a lack of traction and some taking it easy spots during the run. They had a marathon and half that day as well and they took off ahead of us.
We started 5 minutes after them which meant we had to weave through quite a few runners until the turn around. I started out a little too fast and split a 5:36 first mile and then a 5:55 second mile. After that I settled into low 6 minute miles and ran in the top 5 the whole race. I tried to put on a surge with about 1 mile to go and just couldn't catch the 3rd/4th place guys. They ended up about 200 meters or less up on me and I ended up finishing 5th. It was a PR for me with a time of 37:10. I was really pleased with this considering the lack of sleep and the course conditions along with temps.
Time- 37:10
Overall- 5th/Approx 200-300 runners
Well I had a workout scheduled for Christmas since I knew I was going to be off that day and figured I could get in a good long workout. Luckily there are other people out there as crazy as me believe it or not. My buddy Zach came over and we put in a solid 2 1/2 hours on the trainer while watching the Kona broadcast. Nothing better than getting in a good workout while sitting there watching coverage of a place you dream of being in 10 months. After the ride I finished off the workout with a 30min run. Wasn't a bad way to start Christmas. Following the run I got in my days sleep of about 4 hours and then headed down to the VFW for the Christmas feast.
The VFW has been my place away from home during the holidays. They always have a great spread of food and always a good group of people down there for Christmas and Thanksgiving. I went down there with a few friends and it was a good time.
Below are some pics from the 10k:
To the left in the picture is Norah the speed demon from Seoul Flyers. She has been undefeated this season as far as I know. She makes a nice little earning by kicking butt in races. The guy in the red to the right in the picture won the race in low 33's.
Coming down the last 100 meters.
Glad to be done and ready to get some sleep, ended up getting 3 hours of sleep prior to work. That was a long 12 hour shift that night!
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