Whoa, I'm Scared!

This weekend is the big Chile Pepper Cross Country Festival. It is a 10K cross country style race that plays host to races for all ages from junior high to collegiate athletes and an open race for the rest of us! Let's just say I'm more than a little scared for the race. 

2009 Chile Pepper Race

My past history for the race is as follows:
2006 - 1 hr 5 min 50 sec
2007 - 1 hr 4 min 54 sec
2009 - 1 hr 2 min 37 sec (setting a 2 sec PR!)

Following the 2009 race, I ran in the Route 66 1/2 Marathon a month later and had an awesome 10K split which was definitely under the one hour mark.  The Route 66 course is notorious for the hilly start so this was a challenging 10K equivalent.  Chile Pepper is equally challenging given that it is a cross country course that takes you on a couple loops of the race course which means you hit a couple hills more than once!

Our weekly speed workouts have been gearing us up for this race and working on dialing in our pace.  I have had awesome workouts the last two weeks.  All of this is adding up to me being freaked out and super scared for the race!

Last week the workout was a non-stop four mile speed effort.  It was based on the Prefontaine 30/40 workout.  Essentially you do 200m at half marathon pace followed by 200m at just slower than mile pace.  For me, my goal splits were 1:15/1:05 or 2:20 per quarter.  (PRE did his 200 splits in 30 sec and 40 sec respectively which is how the workout got its name.) The speedwork plus my warmup and cooldown added up to over 6.2 miles and I noted that I hit the 6.2 mile mark at 1 hr 1 min.  It would have been a race PR (I had my watch paused between the warmup and the start of the workout.) I kept to my paces and actually picked up the pace over the last two miles of the speed portion.  It was a great confidence builder for me. 

This week the workout was a little bit more challenging.  We did 4x400m repeats and did 4 sets of the repeats.  The first repeat started at 5K pace and then each 400 got a few seconds faster.  We got 50 seconds rest between the 400m in the set and 90 seconds rest between sets.  Each set returned to 5K pace and descended back down.  I started around a 2:15 per 400 and worked down to 2:00 per 400 for the 4th in each set.  I had one goof up at the start of my 3rd set where my time was 2:30 which was necessary since I had to work out a side stitch.  My warmup, workout, and cooldown totalled exactly 6.2miles and again it would have been a race PR with my total workout time at 58 min 01 sec.  YIKES!!! I don't like this pressure that is building up for Saturday.

Needless to say, I'll be working on positive thoughts over the week.  I need to develop a race plan that I can be confident with and then I need to EXECUTE the Plan.  I should build in a little time change because of the cross country and hills on the course compared to what my recent track splits have been.  Again, YIKES! I think the soundtrack for my week will be a little David Bowie "Under Pressure."