Its the Ted Corbit 15k race today in Central Park. I have not done a road race since probably spring, and have not run in central park since July, so today will be interesting. It's the last race of the year, and this is a new distance for me. My goal is to run a 7:25 mm average pace. I slept well last night about 6.5 hours. Dinner night before was low in carbs and high in protein, red meat and fish. Had dessert before bed. Woke up feeling good. Had coffee and my typical oatmeal, yogurt, protein blend in the car on the way to pick up race number (about 1 1/2 hrs before race start). Thankfully david drove me to NYRR building to pick up my stuff. Jogged a bit (about 2 miles) and added some short pick ups. It's a cld morning in Central Park, 27 degrees ant 6mph winds. Supposed to get a big snow storm today. First mile or so was slow, wasn't placed in a good corral, but by mile 2 was feeling my pace and thought I would be able to maintain it. Ran counter clockwise, skipping Harlem hill and did a full circle of park. At mile 5 I had a gel and think I should have done this about 10 min earlier based upon how my body felt immediately after the gel. Second loop cut across 72nd street and after that there was really only one more big hill. I picked up the pace for the last 2 miles but looking at my average pace I was disappointed that I never caught up to the 7:25 pace I wanted to achieve. Based on my marathon goal of 8:00 i should be able to run a 15k at 7:25. Now Paris is flat and CP is a very challening course, so maybe i'm being to hard on myself, but disappointed that my av pace was 7:34. My HR was really high, and think that is part of the reason I had a hard time holding a faster pace. MY HR average was 180 and I maxed out on some of the hills at 189bpm. If i cut out the first mile of the race where my pace was averaging 8:14 because I had to work through the crowd, my av pace for the race would have been 7:32, not such a big deal as I thought. It was really the big hills that slowed me down. Wonder how I would have fared on a flatter course or a course I'm used to running. The official road runner results were time 1:12:06, pace 7:45, distance 9.3 miles. My Garmin said I ran 9.52 miles so I used that data as my analysis. I ran most of the race along the right side because it's less banked there and is easier to pass, but clearly this makes for a longer race than the official distance. For women 40-44 I placed 18 out of 156 which is the top 11.5%. For all women I placed 140 out of 1750 which put me at the top 8%, and overall I placed 662 out of 3467 which is top 19%. So overall I was really happy with the results. Only thing I would have done differently is run miles 2-4 a bit slower, have a gel between 3 and 4 (about 45 min in) and another at 6 to 7. Also I used the hammer gels and i do better at high intensity races with the power bar gels.