a rough go for me yesterday--slow time, second place, and aggravated heel bursitis. i guess at our age, if you ain't hurt, you ain't trying hard enough. castille's the real deal--he sure made it look easy, gapping me by over 5 seconds by the first mile (he was 4:37-ish, i was maybe 4:45-ish) and never looking back. i gave chase over the second mile, with both of us running into a stiff headwind, my mind alternating between thoughts of hoping he'd fall apart so i needed to put myself in position to pick up the pieces, to hoping he was a young sub-40 runner doing the 25k combined races division, to that @$$hole better not be a young punk pulling me along in a mad chase which could cost me getting beat when i fall apart, to that final acceptance at the last 180 turn/half mile to go that i'm running for second.
hard to know what the wind cost us--at least through the first 2.5 miles i felt i was putting in sub-15 effort, and castille is easily capable of faster than 14:57, even unchallenged as he was. also hard to know if staying with him from the gun would have yielded different results--i'm definitely in better shape than my 15:30 reflects. certainly not knowing him made it easy for me to let him go, thinking he didn't know what he was doing--obviously that won't happen again. oh well, there's always next year.
on a more positive note, the beer garden was serving an excellent assortment of belgian style ales that allowed me me to blissfully limp into post-race oblivion (aided by, as steeplechump notes above, extra race bibs along with trading away my two second place plaques, my medal, and my second place backpack)...
370 days and counting,
cush