Last Saturday I officially kicked off my 2010 season. I have been lying low since the GT 100, finishing up the cross country season, teaching, and working on my house. It had been about 15 years since I had laced up the spikes and ran a cross country race. After a week of training I had been battling a bit of a SI/hip thing but was excited to run anyway. I thought that maybe if I had a really good day I could even break 17:00. The weather on race day was chilly. I met and introduced myself to Neil Olsen from Ashland, talked to a few other coaches that were running and then we were off. Our start was so impressive some of the high schoolers shouted “Hey, its 5k not 50k.” The course consisted of 2 loops around the lake at Eagle Island State Park. I knew that I would need to start conservatively with my current fitness to survive. After a frenetic start I tried to keep an eye on the front-runners while moving through the chase pack. After a few hairpin turns in the woods we spilled out onto the beach. We went through the mile in about 5:20 and I didn’t feel to strained. We then weaved our way through the park and up the “big” hill on the course. (I would have done much better if there were 10 more of them) before moving on to the second loop. I moved to the front of the chase pack coming off the hill and then went to work on catching the leaders. As I hit the hill the second time I fought off a side stitch and wasn’t able to make up as much as I would have liked, ending in 17:27 for 5th place. A decent marker to base my training for this winter.