Another trip around Seneca Lake

On Sunday I ran the Seneca 7 relay race around Seneca Lake for the third year. This year I ran leg three, and our team finished the loop around the lake in 10:29:44 which is over 20 minutes quicker than last year.

The third runner has some of the easier legs to run so I went into my first leg wanting to start out strong. The first leg was 4.4 miles of rolling hills and I paced myself as if I was running a 5k. This did start to hurt in the last mile, but I am glad that I gave it my all.

At 4.7 miles the second leg was a big longer, but it was massively downhill. This is the leg I had really been looking forward to. The first mile is fairly flat and uneventful, but then the course heads downhill into Watkins Glen. The twoish miles of downhill were a lot of fun and probably some of the fastest that I have run in years. Then suddenly there is another mile and a half that needs to be run through the town without the assist of gravity and you comparatively find yourself feeling so slow.

The final leg was a single mile and is a ridiculous thing to include in a race like this. I did my best to pretend that I was a sprinter (and actually passed a number of runners), but after the earlier miles and a full day of driving a car my legs had very little raw speed in them.

My next race will be the Run Our Trails race on Tuesday, which will be my first trail race of the year.