Before I get to the big post, let’s look at the day before. My friend and colleague Katie decided that we would take advantage of not having a football game on marathon Sunday for the first time since the stadium opened by entering the TC 10 Mile lottery. I’ve done this race once before (2003) and knew it was a fairly tough entry to get. Amazingly, we were both selected and placed in corral C. We were thinking about a ten minute mile goal and set about creating a brief training schedule of short runs during the week and a longer run on weekends that we would increase each week.

Since I’m now a terrible training partner, we only managed two long weekend runs: one rainy seven miler around the lakes in Minneapolis and one eight miler along the Mississippi. Combined with some bike cross training, I was OK with this and felt fine with our prep on race morning. The four corral setup was different than 2003 and was really nice – we basically started right in the middle of the Commons before heading towards the river. It was also interesting to see how they used the Vikings Longhouse for VIP runners.

The weather and the race itself were both very nice. We ran a leisurely 10:49 pace, finishing right around the 1:48 mark (Katie results, DK results). The medals this year were very nice and the finish line food was excellent, as usual. We both felt fine after the race and walked back down the hill to our brunch reservations at Parlour St. Paul. Colleen picked us up afterwards and we dropped off Katie at her house. I remember watching the Vikings beat the Eagles and getting up for work the next day, but then I basically don’t remember anything that happened the next three days (more on that coming soon).