Tarzan Brown Run 2009

Today I ran over to the Tarzan Brown Mystic River Run to run this race for the 8th consecutive year. Since I don't want to look up the history every year I'll summarize this officially in my blog:

1. 2002 - first race and pretty good considering my training: 41:54 - 7:36 pace.
2. 2003 - 44:48 and 8:20 pace - disappointing - probably got me training more though.
3. 2004 - 43:02 and 7:49 - another ho-hum year.
4. 2005 - 39:14 and 7:08 - first year of Julia's life - first year on the running team - best time yet.
5. 2006 - 37:27 and 6:48 - a remarkably good run. My best ever, if not for...
6. 2007 - 37:21 and 6:47 - best run ever? maybe.
   
7. 2008 - 37:40 and 6:51 - still pretty good, but starting to float up.
8. 2009 - read on...
   

This year I had a lot going against me. First I did 22 miles on Friday and my legs felt a little sore still today. I'll combine this with reason 1a - lots of mileage this week including 3 miles during my race warmup. Second - and probably worse, I went to a Halloween party last night and ended up with 4 or 5 pints of Beamish - not horrible, but not great. Thirdly I haven't done much speed work this year. I really did push the last 2 miles - but really couldn't close past the 7-minute/mile pace. So I ended up doing roughly 38:45 - or 7:03 min/miles. Really not bad at all - but this has always been my best race - so even with all the reasonable excuses - a little underwhelming.