8:45.34

My first outdoor race of the 2011 season is officially in the books, and I am looking forward to what the rest of the year has in store for me.  I ran the Nike Invitational 3k in 8:45 today, and I have to say that I am pleased with the time, without being ecstatic.  I'm sure it was a great race to watch, as there was a pack of 8 or so, running right around 8:32-8:36.  Through 2k, it was more like a pack of 15 with myself included, but I wasn't able to respond when they decided to ramp things up.  I believe my last km was 2:56 or so, while they ran around 2:44-2:48 leaving me in their dust.  However, there were some upsides to my run today, as I ran 15 seconds quicker than I did in the same race 1 year ago and came within 4 seconds of a new Personal Best.  Also, being able to comfortably stick with the leaders through 2k gave me a little more confidence in my strength, and has already got me thinking about how I'm going to close that gap in the last kilometer, in order to truly compete with some of the fastest high school runners in Canada.  It's only about 4 more weeks until OFSAA which will be one of my big focus races this year, so the plan is basically to run one race each week until the beginning of June. This will give me a few more opportunities to race well and work on changing gears in the later parts of the race, as well as running a few more quick times.  I will be running next on May 11th-12th, and hopefully I come home with something worth blogging about.