Going With The Flow

Liberty Park loops with Allie, very casual and enjoyable run.

I have been pleased with my last three weeks of training since the Indy 5k, with over 40 miles and two quality runs each week. This week I am taking it easy in prep for the 5k race next Saturday - my last, and hopefully best, race of the season.

Scheduled day off! I have finally gotten to a point where I understand the value in taking days off from running so it's not nearly as difficult as it used to be :)

Logic of Long Distance always has great philosphocal blogs about running. This is an excerpt from his Toughness post -

"Being mentally tough is less about confronting pain and more about controlling the attention. The toughest racers are those who allow their attention to be "consumed by the race," as a friend recently described it. Being tough, paradoxically, doesn't mean confronting the largest amount of pain. What it demands is literally not feeling the pain at all--keeping the attention absorbed in other things, like controlling the body, competing with rivals, maintaining the rhythms of the running motion. When we achieve a race like this, we usually call it a breakthrough. What has been "broken through" is an old preperception, an old habit of attending to an image of the self or of pain that was supposed to come but didn't."

Tuesday Track Workout. The goal of this workout was to sharpen up for the 5K. 4x200m + 6x400m w/200m jog recovery between reps. Splits were 43-46-42-43 + 84-83-82-81-79-78. I got a little negative-split happy during the workout! 

Easy 3 mile recovery run. We are headed to Phoenix this evening and I am looking forward to lots of warm sunshine!

Paced Jake's dad in the Mesa turkey trot for 4 miles.

Easy 4 miles in Phoenix with Jake. I have that dead legs feeling that I always seem to get the day before a race. Renegades 5k tomorrow - I'm planning to go after sub-18 as long as my right leg/groin cooperates. I'd say there's a 50/50 chance I can do it.

Would've been a sub-18 if it was a 5k! Great end to the season.

This morning, I ran the Renegades Run to support the Arizona Academy of Youth Soccer. The course was one big loop and very flat. It was a small race of ~150 runners, mostly kids and parents of the academy. Jake and I debated whether he should pace me or not, and we finally decided that it wouldn't affect his training negatively and would help me a lot. 

The start was as crazy as always when lots of kids are racing. I squeezed myself onto the start line and we were off. I knew that 5:47 pace would be a stretch and it was...it felt really fast from the beginning. We "settled" right on pace and hit the first mile in 5:47. I passed the first girl shortly after the mile then focused on keeping good form. Jake pushed the pace a bit on the 2nd mile with a 5:42 in order to give me a confidence boost. The final mile was a straight shot to the finish. I really started hurting at 2.25 miles and said to Jake "Help!". He pushed me through that last bit to keep pressing. The course ended up being exactly 3 miles, running the last mile at 5:49 and with a finish time of 17:20. That was HARD - I ran as hard as I could and am proud to have run that fast :) 

Part of me was disappointed not to race the full 5K and the other part was really happy it was over! I am confident that I would have finished barely under 18 minutes for the 5K which has been my fall goal since I had surgery back in May. It's been a long journey since then and I still have a long way to getting back to 100%, but this fall season has given me a lot of hope that I will continue to feel better every month. 

I really appreciate all the encouragement that I have gotten in the last year. I have had a lot of ups and downs, and the people on this blog have helped me in so many ways.