Nielson Challenge Record Broken

Well,
The record went down in a big way this weekend!!!! As many people know, a group of local runners here in the springs set out to break the 10 minute time at the 2 mile Nielson Challenge. Only one person had come close to getting under 10 minutes (Justin Chaston) so we decided it was time to go for attempt 1. I had worked with a few of my close running friends to set this up, so we make an event page on Face book, and Andy Rinne contacted someone at the Pikes Peak Road Runners and had them post something about it on their website.
The web posting helped attract people to come out and watch the event, and we had people telling us that they only came out to see us break the record. Talk about pressure!!! Now, the Nielson Challenge is not a big time event, and its free every month. Its a figure 8 course that has a 180 degree at the 800 meter turn around point. Kinda sucks to have to basically stop and get going again.
On race day, Ryan Hafer, Robby Young, Justin Ricks, Daniel Castaneda, Andy Rinne, Andrew Abdella and myself were there. Ryan, Robby, Justin and I talked about not going out like fools and focusing on running the 800 in about 2:20-2:23. We hit it in 2:22 I believe. The mile was about 4:53 or so, and right on target. The third 800 meter section of the course is the hardest and you are basically running uphill and not trying to die. We knew that this section would make or break the race, so Robby and I pushed hard and tried to maintain the pace. At this point Justin had fallen back a bit and Ryan was hanging on as well as he could. We finished the 1.5 miles of the race and had just the last 800 meters to go. This is the fastest part of the course and I decided that it was time to really make the final hard push to the finish and put a little gap on Robby. However, we had already talked about finishing together so I backed off just slightly and we ran it in finishing in 9:48, breaking the record by 13 seconds. Three of us broke the 10 minute barrier, and 6 total ran under 11 minutes. Almost perfect splits of 4:53 and 4:55 or so.
I was very impressed about the support we received from the other runners and thank them for being there. For a small race in November that usually doesn't get many people out because the time of the year, over 120 people showed up to participate. Again very impressed with the turnout. The PPRR people were great and really had a great time being part of something that had never been done before.
After the race I continued on with Robby and Justin and we did another 21 minute workout.
There are some pictures of the race on the PPRRUN.ORG website and a small write up about what we did.