Sitting at the airport now in Taiyuan and wait for my flight back to Shanghai. Legs are bloody tired.
Successful weekend. Great race. The course was perfect and weather conditions also. 14°C at the start and later no more than 20°C. I blasted away my old PB from Tengzhou 3 month ago and finished here in Taiyuan in 3h:21m:27s.
I came to Taiyuan to run this event not as fast as possible. I planned torun it stable and even with a 5:10-5:15min/km pace, but plans a just good enough to change them. Already at the start I saw the 3:30h pace maker and planned now to follow him him, but again the plan had to adjust. After the start I could follow very easy the 3:00h pace makers for one hour. After one hour I had to slow down some seconds per km and followed a new calculated plan to finish the race by 3.15h-3:20h. For the 3:15h I had no more power at km38 (I guess it was the fault of the 5km pre-race run from hotel to starting line 🙂 ), so 3:21:27 is fair enough and more than I thought a few hours ago.
Very wise I chose a hotel 5km away from start/finish so I ended up with additional 2x5km in my legs and total 52km on my Garmin watch. Curahee!
