She ran, she ran 8k away.....

Today was the St. Patrick's Day 8k in Washington, DC. It was gray, misty, and a bit chilly. But, there was a large crowd out -- over 5000 runners and walkers. Met up with ML - who has joined me in many a race - and T - who has been doing some long runs with me. The minuses - the course back-tracked on itself a couple of times. They didn't have miles or kilometers marked off, so it was hard to gauge my pace. I just ran as hard as I could, for as long as I could. There was no one to tell me where the water was. I was on the other side of the road when I realized there was water -- finally and it was one of those courses were you could see the finish line, but then the course veers away and then comes back. Lastly, the water - there was no one handing water out at the end of the course -- you had to walk a distance and cut through the crowd of people waiting for their runner to finish. The plus side -- I finished the 8k in 47:35 net and 49:30 clock time. My 5k was 30:02 which was also faster than the New Year's Day 5k I did. The question is .... will this bode well for the Cherry Blossom 10-miler?