Shamrock Shuffle

This past weekend marked the beginning of the spring running season in Chicago as the shamrock shuffle was run. Overall it was a really good race for me. I finished in 26:17 which is a 40 second PR over last year's time. Also the pace of 5:17 per mile is the same per mile pace as my 5K PR, which is also encouraging. They did have a marker at 5K in this race and I came through it in 16:10 which would be a 12 second PR if I would have stopped there. Sub 16 seems very doable.

Of course the real drama in the race was the finish. My friend Dave and I were both shooting for a sub 26:30 and our training over the winter has been remarkably similar. I knew we'd be finishing very close to each other, but even I wasn't expecting this finish:



So while it appears that he got me by a foot, the official results show me as coming in a second ahead of him. After way too much analysis on the finishing photo, it has been determined that it came down to chip placement. I led with the chip foot, he didn't. Better luck next time Dave. I'll just chalk this one up to veteran savvy.