Running a race with Power2Run

Today I ran the Christmas Relay 4.5 mile run around Lake Merced. I've been a little out of shape and was asked to anchor the B relay for the Excelsiors running team.  My goal was to pace myself as evenly as possible over the terrain. For those of you unfamiliar with the course the first 1/2-1 mile ascends a hill of around 50 feet then drops down into the second mile.

My Power splits were as follows....


 You can quickly see I started the race up the first hill a little enthusiastically running 318 Watts which is 12 watts higher than the race average 306 Watts.  You can see down the hill I backed off to a more realistic 308 Watts and settled into that pace for another mile or two. Running with Power helped a great deal here by smoothing out my efforts of the slight rollers on the course. The first mile enthusiasm probably cost me a few watts in mile 4 when you see I dropped my pace to an average of 294 Watts.  Then with the finish line in sight I powered up the last hill at a steady but not spectacular 318 Watts. This run tells me I need to work on endurance because I was fading around mile 3-4. I also learned that I need to be running intervals in the 320-340 Watt range to improve my critical running power for the next race. My final time was a 27:17 seconds run at 4.4 Watts per kg and an average pace of 6:06 minutes per mile..........Note if I had tried to run even mile splits I likely would have run much too slowly on the downhills and expect I would have averaged 6:12 miles. Running with a Power meter probably shaved about 30 seconds off my finishing time!


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