Jingling on Icy Trails

This morning I ran the Broad Run Trail Jingle Bell 5 Miler.  I ran this race last year, and it was really fun so I decided to do it again.  This year the trails had a little adventure in store for us.  It had iced on Monday, snowed on Tuesday, been really cold all week, and then snowed lightly for about an hour before the race so the trails were really icy in most parts.  I was just trying not to get hurt since I'm going into the 50K next weekend. 

I met up with some friends from Moms Run This Town, and we were ready to run.  I didn't really have a race goal other than not to get hurt and to run by feel.  I hid my Garmin under my shirt sleeve and just planned to check it around mile 3 to see how things were going.  I was feeling pretty good in the first mile.  Mile 2 was really icy so I slowed a bit just to be cautious.  By the time I hit mile 3 we had a road section so I picked up the pace again.  Then I checked my watch and was pleasantly surprised to see that I was on pace to PR.  So I locked in and pushed a little when I got back on the trail.  I crossed the finish line in 47:43 which was slightly over a 2 minute PR for my trail 5 mile time.  My overall pace was 9:32 which is really fast for me on trails especially given the icy conditions today.  I felt really good about this run.  Looking at the splits, I almost got a good negative split race with the exception of mile 2 which was really icy and caused me to slow down. 

Splits:  Mile 1:  9:55; Mile 2:  10:06; Mile 3:  9:54; Mile 4:  9:10; Mile 5:  9:08