Run race 1:52:52 [4] *** 15.8 km (7:09 / km) +510m 6:09 / km
spiked:24/29c
A pretty disappointing day in the race that I was building for in the second half of the year. It was particularly disappointing because my problems were more mental than physical - most obviously in my worst mistake in a major Australian event for fifteen years, a four-minute parallel error on 13, but also in thinking that I'd horribly misjudged my pace when in fact I'd probably got it close to right.
I took the first part of the course reasonably conservatively but didn't have any real glitches, other than a fall at 1 when I hit the elbow I broke in 2005, which was fairly painful for a couple of minutes. (It's swelled up quite significantly since; had it been my knee I probably would have struggled to run the relays). The first glitch was at 9, a knoll in the green, which I overran and lost 45 seconds at. It was here that I saw Liggo. This really rattled me. I knew he'd started six minutes after me, and also knew he was in excellent running form; two minutes wouldn't have alarmed me too much, but six? For the rest of the day I was thinking that I was running much too slowly, but couldn't lift my pace much further. (It turned out it wasn't surprising he'd got there six minutes faster than me - he was running a different course).
After the mistake at 13 I spent most of the second half thinking I was on a catastrophic run, when in fact it was merely mediocre. Held the pace OK on a warm morning, and was reasonably smooth for most of the second loop, before blowing another minute or so at 22, something which had a turnover-in-the-backline-when-30-points-down-at-the-27-minute-mark-of-the-last-quarter feel to it.
I ended up 11th; a couple of those ahead of me probably benefited from a train, but this didn't deserve to be a top-ten run and wasn't. I think 105-106 would have been a good time for me; Craig's 102 for third was probably out of reach. Had a reasonable amount in reserve at the end which did give me some optimism for tomorrow, but today was an opportunity lost, and at my age one's conscious that there may not be many more.
The rest of the day was devoted to Grand Final watching, three separate selection meetings, a presentation and dinner and my second-last passage through Maryborough. I still haven't worked out what keeps the place afloat (other than Centrelink) and none of the Queenslanders seem to know either, other than that it's there because it's there and used to be important.