Jay Dix 10k – April 12th, 2008

Starting this year, the Jay Dix Challenge to Cure run was now part of the Ultramax Series. This is the race series that I won in it’s inaugural year, 2004 and after several years of helping produce it, had returned to take second in 2007. Success in this series is a high priority for me, so naturally the Jay Dix 10k became an early focal point of my season.In 2007, I had narrowly edged Rodney Adkison for second place, despite never actually beating him in a race head to head. Rodney has been consistently faster than I am since the one time I beat him in 2004 and after I edged him for second in 07′ he informed me I was “going down” this year!

Saturday, the day of the race arrived with cold and windy weather. The race started by heading east up Cherry Street, a steady climb of about a quarter of a mile. I quickly settled in behind Rodney deciding I would attempt to follow whatever pace he chose to run. The initial pace felt fine and we passed mile one at about 5:50. What had begun as a moderate pace was slowly increasing and my Garmin began to display a pace in the 5:30 per mile range. At this point I should have backed off and run my own race, but I decided to keep running directly behind Rodney and hope he backed off a little on the pace. We reached the turn around point of the first 5k loop and I was right on his heels but I began to fall off his pace at this point.

By the end of the first loop I had fallen to about 45 seconds to a minute behind and was definitely hurting. My time for the first 5k was 18:16 which happened to be my fastest 5k time of the year and at that point I was still in second place, though Stephen Bourgeois was right on my heels. Within the first mile of the second loop, both Gerald Holtmeyer and then Stephen Bourgeois would pass me. At this point I was paying for running the first two miles at a pace too fast considering I was racing a 10k, not a 5k! Eventually I would finish in 4th place with a 38:08, 6:09 per mile pace.