Rock Cut Trail Series 15k

Race Report
Going into the race I said that I wanted to take it kind of easy. I haven't really been running fast or frequent as of late, so I was worried going "all out" could give me an injury. My overall fitness is pretty strong so I thought it would be neat to see how low I could keep my HR while running a solid time. Well, I would like to say I took it easy and didn't try, blah, blah, blah, but the truth is, I gave it all I could today. My heart rate numbers say I was working pretty hard too. Here is a little break down by mile of my Avg HR. (My max HR is 199)

1. 171
2. 175
3. 178
4. 179
5. 181
6. 179
7. 184
8. 184
9. 184
10. 189(last .3mile)

9.3Mile HR AVG = 180 BPM
Results

I came in 15th place out of about 130 runners. Normally I wouldn't be too happy with 15th, but there were a lot of "ringers' from out of town, as well as some real strong local runners. 3 of which I ran neck and neck with most of the day (Brad Born, Tom Lichty, and Tim Sage). These are 3 real nice guys. It seems like every local running race I do, I am neck and neck with them.Course

This was an Awesome course on a beautiful day. There was 5-8 inches of fresh, uncleared snow, lots of hills, crazy trails, trees to jump over, ropes to climb, flights of stairs to scale. One of the hills without a rope was so steep that we had to bear crawl up, to keep from falling over. Most of the runners were about 2 minutes per mile slower than their normal race time. Tough course. Fun course!

Evaluation of Test 1 Toward Ironman

Priority #1: I did not get injured. Even though I did fall twice on the treacherous trail...
This was validation that my training plan is working so far. I have had limited time to train, but have been doing workouts that maximize the effectiveness of my training time. I feel like I have a lot of training tricks up my sleeve for the upcoming year. I haven't begun to pull them out yet. It is nice to know that I can have decent results without doing any race specific training.

Test 2 Toward Ironman

In 8 days I am doing an indoor 10k Cycling time trial. It will let me know where my cycling fitness is. The course record is 14 min+. Even though bike specific training has been limited, I hope my overall fitness gets me within 02:30 of the course record. We will see.