Kind of late posting this. Oh well.
The air felt like soup. A thunderstorm had swept through a few hours earlier, but it must have been an air-mass thunderstorm rather than a frontal storm because we had neither cool air nor winds afterwards. The rain kept the number of participants down, but on the plus side the bay was flat and the creek was high. Still, I wasn’t expecting a personal best because of the humidity.
I started out pretty fast, maintaining a speed better than 6.5 mph for the first two minutes. My split time was 9.33 minutes, which is my fastest yet. I was worried that a fast split would mean a big fade for the second half, but it wasn’t bad. I kept my speed up well to the turn, but had a lousy turn – I’m not sure what I did wrong, but the flat spot on the speed graph is longer and lower than usual. Downstream was really fast. I even managed to put in a bit of a sprint at the finish. My second half was 9.57, which isn’t my slowest or my fastest, leading to a total time of 18.90, a new personal record by 0.05 minutes. Nothing too mind blowing, but unexpected and satisfying. Paul D, who claims that he doesn’t care about our “rivalry” but always seems to be checking up on my time, had a bad night and finished behind me for the first time in a number of weeks, at 18.93. However he has the perfect excuse because he participated in a killer race the weekend before.