my makeup may be flaking

I did .5 hours in the bike

I hour on the bike 22 miles

I hour on the bike-23 miles with about 3 miles at 6:10 pace on the track.

Two loops of liberty park

11 miles biking plus 6 miles running at 5:50 pace.

Starting to feel normal again!

Ran 6.5 in the morning and 9 in the evening. Evening run, the foot felt better.

Very nice run with no pain in my foot.

Did 4 in the morning and 9 in the evening.

Decided to jump in the run like health 5k. I wanted to see how my foot would respond to some fast running.

On the injury side, I started to experience some tightness with about a half mile to go. I felt my foot tightnening up on my evening run and stopped to stretch it each time. I'm not sure if it was the shoes or the fast running or not icing before hand. I'll have to figure that out in the next week.

On the racing side, it was actually a race this year as Fritz showed up. He took an early lead and I was having some trouble staying with him. I kept surging to stay in contact. At about 1.5 miles, he suddenly slowed down and I took the opportunity to throw in a very hard surge on an uphill. I kept a 10m gap until close to the end when I threw in a very fast last quarter to open up a 70-80m lead.. I stayed quite relaxed during the second half of the race as I was worried about my foot. I felt pretty good when I finished.

Races so far this year

SLCTC 15K 3rd

MI Half marathon 2nd

Run like health 5K 1st

Boston Marathon?? (Does DNF/DNS count as zeroth place?)

Yeah so I'm still not sure about boston. I really want to give it a go but I'm going to be smart.

I was feeling a little sick again today. Given that my foot was tight I decided to just take the whole day off.

I did 10 miles in my flats and my feet felt fine. I stopped halfway through to stretch them out but I'm not sure it was necessary. I think these shoes may be the cause of my problems, but I think I can get through a marathon in them and then they will get retired.

So let's review:

Sinus infection hits me in february, stalling my marathon training. Did MI halfmarathon after recovering and ran 1:11:24. Next day I got tendonitis. Two weeks of cross training, followed by a week of training. Then I got sick and recovered on thursday. On wednesday, doctors told me I may have a hernia and during my trip here my groin felt really sore.

Needless to say my expectation were low. At the start I stayed relaxed and just decided to try to pick it up until I found a nice groove. I gradually picked it up until the ridiculous 5:27 in mile 6. I shortened my stride and kept my pace pretty consisten for a while. I could feel myself gradually tightening up though. At mile 12, a competitor told me "There's a lot of guys up there James, see how many you can get", as I was so effortlessly cutting through the field. I responded that I wasn't sure how long I could keep it up. I was confident about sub 2:30 up until mile 19 when I went over 6 minutes for the first time. I realized that I had to average sub 6 the rest of the way and that I still hadn't hit the big one. I was also running out of people to pass at this point and climbed heartbreak all alone.

When I crested heartbreak I knew that it was make of break for me. I had to run sub 5:40 for mile 22 to have a shot at sun 2:30 I thought. I ran 5:52 and knew that it just couldn't happen. My legs were cramping up pretty badly and so I just decided to finish it out and place as high as I could. I still managed to pass more people during the final run into Boston and I managed not to slow down ridiculously.

I staggered across the finish line and almost toppled over but the medical staff was there to catch me. My legs felt totally trashed. This was what I expected from myself. I could tell that my legs were just not used to the pounding of running from the few longer runs I've done in the last month. I'm very pleased that I was able to still PR at BOSTON! despite these issues and I feel like I've got a TON of room for improvement. I'm going to get myself healthy and try again next year.