Desert Classic 30K 2005

I did all right in the 30K on Sunday. I know I said I would probably do a 5K close to home, but this is the way it worked out.
I still haven't qualified for Boston, even though I've been about as close as you can get. There's a local marathon, the Desert Classic Marathon, on February 19th. Last year, this race was a mess. The location of the race wasn't settled until days before it was run. I'm not sure if it was ever certified.
So, because I wanted to take another shot at qualifying for Boston, I wrote an email to the Arizona Road Racers to find out if the permits were all in place and the course was certified. And I asked for details about the course.
They assured me it would be certified, they had the permits, and I could try out most of the course by running the 30K on Sunday. So even though I ran a very tough, hilly, 10 mile trail run on Saturday, the National Trail in South Mountain to Buena Vista and back, I went out to Surprise to run this 30K on Sunday.
It is all on one road, out and back. It's a gradual uphill on the way out, so downhill coming back to the finish. It's all in the bike lane, as wide as the car lanes, which is plenty wide enough for a small race like this.
I decided that my goal was to run a consistent pace, whatever I could manage. I thought it might be around 8:30 or 9, but I wasn't having any trouble keeping it close to 8 minutes per mile.
I was glad I had my Garmin, as the mile markers were all messed up after 3 miles. Up to that point, they were the same mile markers used by the 5K and the 10K.
From the 4 mile marker out they had mixed up the placement of signs for the out and back, so on the way out, they were .3 miles off, and on the way in, they were .6 off, until you got to 15 miles. A lot of runners without any GPS or good sense of pace and distance thought they were running a terrific pace until they ran a mile and a half between the 14 mile and 15 mile markers.
It wasn't until I hit the turnaround that I realized that one reason I had been able to keep up a good pace on the uphill was that I had a tailwind. Unfortunately, when I turned around, it became a headwind. It wasn't terrible, just always there, varying between noticeable and significant, all the way back.
All the way out, whenever the hills started to get to me, I told myself, "This will help you on the way back. It will be so easy." I didn't feel an earthquake, but there must have been some kind of geological event, because somehow the road had tipped the other way while I was running, and it ended up being uphill both ways.
Somebody caught me from behind near about mile 12, and I pulled in behind him for a while, drafting. Not wanting to be a parasite, I got ahead of him after a while and let him follow me. We traded off a couple of times and caught two other runners this way.
Then he picked it up in the last couple of miles. I didn't have it in me to go faster. I started to do the same drafting then leading with one of the runners we had caught, but he got away from me in the last mile. I was within a few seconds of him at the finish, and it turned out he was third in my age group.
I would say that I could have beaten him if I had tried harder, but truthfully, if I had challenged him, he probably would have given it more kick at the finish.
So I ran it in 2:32:34, an 8:12 pace, which I think is fine two weeks after Tucson and 24 hours after a hard trail run.
And I think I will try the Desert Classic Marathon in February. This may be a course I can do better on.