Matt put this route on my radar earlier this year and it seemed like a fun one to go after together.
Prep: The day before, we biked the route and stashed bottles. I'm really glad we scouted this, especially getting out of the city. The rest of it should be fairly easy to follow if you're good at following turn-by-turn on your watch (I am not) but I would recommend anyone attempting this scout the first 5k. The route is based on something designed for cars, so there's a few spots early on where you need to be pretty comfortable asserting yourself in the road, and/or timing it so there's minimal traffic. Also worth mentioning that the route runs more like 17mi even than the 17.4 listed on the FKT page.
The run: We Blue-Biked to the start in a downpour and did a cursory warmup as the rain subsided. It was about 74º and extremely humid, but thankfully we had good cloud cover. The plan was to average around 6:25 pace through 10mi and squeeze it down from there. We started at about 6:20am and got out pretty quick, but soon settled into a slightly faster-than-planned rhythm. We each had 4 bottles of sports drink out on the course, which thankfully all remained where we had stashed them.
This ended up being a real grind; the heat and slight net uphill chipped away at us, and by the time we got to Lexington we were both feeling pretty bad. We got to the Hancock-Clarke House at the end of the small out-and-back, knocked on the door and yelled, "THE BRITISH ARE COMING!" and refocused for the final push. I struggled pretty badly up the final climb out of Lexington, but the legs still felt pretty okay. We rolled down the other side of the hill and kept pressing as we hit Battle Road. I didn't think I'd have much left, but we were able to close pretty quick, all things considered. We sat and sighed and groaned for a while, wringing rain and sweat from our socks.
Huge shoutout to Jackie for meeting us at the finish with cold drinks and towels.
I'll also take a small victory lap (200m) for calling our shot: just before we headed out, I texted her saying we'd be there around 8:10. We arrived at 8:10.