Finally Racing!

Saturday, February 18th

I hate getting up early (yes, 8:30am definitely counts). It has got to be the hardest thing for me to do now, second to maybe leaving the beer room. At least for track/xc meets I have motivation to get up - my 9am Ma5 attendance is embarrassing low. Now if you haven’t read much about my running during the last few weeks it would be hard to put this into perspective. I would urge you to click here and read it first, but if reading about running bores you to death, feel free to go on to the next section. Don’t worry, I won’t feel offended. ;P JK you're on my running blog you love reading about running.

I ran a 5:10 mile. (It was an actual mile, so that would convert to ~5:08 1600m). It was literally my slowest mile/1600m race (even slower than time trials) since HS junior year track season. My knee was definitely hurting a lot more than it should, so I’m going to get it checked out again on Monday. Every time I stopped running, I would have to stretch out my knee by sitting and pulling it towards my chest ~10-15 times before I could run comfortably again.

Since I haven’t had much speed work recently, I guess I was kind of bad at feeling pace. I got a solid start and went out a little fast, in 72. I was feeling ok but definitely more tired than I should have for the first lap of a mile. I decided to try to stick at around 75s for the rest of the race, despite feeling like absolute crap the whole time (darn my stubbornness). By the time I got to the last lap, my legs were absolutely dead and I could barely even pick them up for the last 100m. My friend who I planned on breaking 5 with passed me right out of that last turn and ended up running 5:05. (Yes, a 5 second gain in the last 100m; I was really dead.) The coach wrote down our splits, but I purposely didn’t want to look at them since I know they’re absolutely pathetic. In general, the race was a pretty bad experience, and immediately after crossing the line, I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t stop wheezing and coughing, which meant I could only walk a cool down.

Hopefully my body isn't totally screwed over. We'll see what happens next week.