Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Valley Forge 5 Miler: Holy Hills!

The Valley Forge Revolutionary 5 Mile Run is a great trek through Valley Forge Park.  With hills fore and aft, it’s not exactly my favorite course (that honor is reserved for The Broad Street Run, coming up in 2 weeks).  Anyway, given the hills, I still ran a race I was happy with.

I clocked a 44:42 on the chip, and a 43:55 on my Garmin GPS.  I’m never quite sure how there’s always such disparity between the two, but it seems my Garmin always makes me faster than the chip!  Putting me under a 9 minute mile for 5 miles was a great tune-up for Broad Street, and my Broad Street time from last year was 1:29:37.  Interestingly, my pace for both Valley Forge 2008 and and Broad Street 2007 according to the clock time was 9:07 pace per mile.  With the hills removed, I’m confident that I might actually beat my Broad Street PR.

The Valley Forge race was also special because I ran it with my good friend Frank.  This was his first race, and he actually beat me by a minute!  I saw him pulling away a little at mile 3 and was pumped to see him doing so well his first time out.  On the heels of that, we’ll both stride down Broad Street in 2 weeks with a few other folks that I’ve been running with for years.  Should be an exciting time for all!

Stay tuned for my results from Broad Street in a couple of weeks!