Look: it's not a water bottle!

Yes! Finally I didn't win another water-bottle.

Greg Cunningham, organizer of the Dash & Dine evening 5k series at the Boulder Res excelled himself tonight, running prizes four deep in every category and dishing out for first places excellent D&D technical tee-shirts made by Descente. Nice shirts!

Yep, so I won my age group again, but I'm still complaining :) I did a relatively slow 19:35 behind winner X-Terra triathlon pro Will Kelsey (17:12), once again failing to really push myself. I finished 17th overall, 5 seconds behind second woman Sunny Gilbert, whom I'd beaten a couple of races ago.

Due to an outbreak of plague among the prairie dog colonies around the park we normally dash from and dine in, the organizing team had to do some fast work at short notice to move the race to a different start and finish near the "beach" at the other end of the Res. That turned out to be a bonus, as we munched our post-race tucker right by the waterside on a glorious evening. The downside was a slightly sharper and longer hill right at the start. Opinions differed as to whether the revised course was faster or not. Third placed Brian Ream from Boulder's Fleet Feet store was adamant that it was faster -- with more of it on road rather than the normal loose gravel surface, how could it not be, he asked? But then he did run 17:33 this time, compared to 18:40 last week on the usual course, so he wasn't complaining.

To be honest I'm not too disappointed with my time. Some may say I'm in tragic denial, but I am veering towards the "you're just not fit" argument. I may have been giving my previous coach Gabino Toledo a bit of hard time about how hard I felt his program was last year, but we had a good chat this evening and his feedback was "You are still looking fine, you have good form, turnover, you don't look too bad...I think you start good in races but eventually you run out of power; this is nothing wrong with your body or your running form or your mind, this is because your muscles cannot handle this fast pace for long. It's that simple." I think he's right.

I've got some ground to catch up, lost because of injury and iron. I'm seriously thinking about calling a halt to all this season's plans and just starting again and focusing on next year. I'm going to decide in the next two weeks. One of the criteria will be how I do in the final Dash & Dine next week.

Anyone thinking of running the D&D who hasn't -- get to this final race, as Greg says we missed a race due to bad weather and he has a stash of prizes -- and he's not taking anything home!

* Check on the D&D website here for info on which course we'll be using.
* X-Terra takes triathlons off-road. Yes, I thought they were hard enough already, too. There is also an X-Terra trail races series. Details here.
* Contact Gabino Toledo via his website here.