my makeup may be flaking

My body said it was ready for more again today so I obliged. 15.1 miles 6:54 avg. Ran up sunnyside, then along the MillCreek Township 8k course, then down 33rd South and back along 5th east. Finished up running some 6:30 miles on the flat. This was again difficult, but I'm getting there.

Des News Death Loop (up Sunnyside to Hogle Zoo, along Wasatch to Thunderbir, back on Foothill and down Sunnyside). 10.9/7:54 avg.

AM To work via the avenues/shoreline trail. 8:35 pace!

PM Home via Des News Loop. Starting to feel good on longer runs.

AM First non-Gimpy JAFAJ run in a while.

PM Ran home.

Ran pretty slowly this evening. Body starting to feel tired from all this running.

OMG! I'm somehow doing striders half and SLC full, what is wrong with me. Oh, it snowed today and stung my eyes while I was running. Ran with Allie. We went fairly fast because we wanted to be done.

The plan was to run 5:45 pace in the early miles and then just hang on. I didn't really know how I would respond, but I figured that a 1:16 was probably the best I would be able to do.

The response was that I felt like I was running in Molasses. I don't just mean that my legs felt heavy, but also that I was heavy a hard to breathing because Molasses was going up my nose.

The first few miles were reasonable fast (5:27,2&3 5:38 avg,5:35). My legs were willing but I felt like I was redlining it aerobically. As the road flattened out I had a hard time maintaining and ran 5:48, 5:55 for mile 5 and 6. I knew that I was in trouble as those two miles were still going downhill.

Normally I welcome gentle rollers and I was happy to see them today, but my breathing kept getting totally out of control. I pushed really hard in miles 7&8 but only got 6:03 and 6:04. At this point I was weaving all over the road. Still, I told myself, these are maybe the fastest miles I've run in months and I just ran 8 of them in a row.

I kind of slowly lost it the last 5 miles and I knew that I would have to work hard to beat my 1:19 from 2009. Glancing back a few times, I could see that there were people behind me getting closer. I ran 6:23 for mile 9. I remember surging on an uphill on mile 10 and managing 6:14. Looking back I could see people were closer and there were 3 miles left.

I was waiting for the inevitable at this point. I slowed again to 6:22 for 11 and 6:32! for 12. I was pretty out of it at this point, but I didn't think I had much left. With 1 mile to go, I was maybe 20secs up on MarkP and I felt confident I could hold onto that. I raised my pace as much as I possibly could: a measly 6:16 last mile.

Despite those terrible final miles I still managed to average 6 flat pace. Even though this is pretty bad for me by typical racing standards, I'm not upset at all. For one thing, I just got back to running. For another, I ran like 10000miles this week. And for yet a third, this race was at even higher elevation than I'm used to and I've always had difficulties with altitude (stupid low VO2 max).

Positives: If I had run 1:16 I still would have finished 5th, but if I had run 2.5 mins slower, I would have finished much lower down. Anyway, I'm currently beating Jake in the Circuit so HA!

Also, running this race early gives me something to compare future races to.

Finally, I didn't feel any problem today with my knee or achilles. My calves are sore, which is something I need to be careful about, but they are sore in a good way.

After the race I cooled down with Devra, Allie, MarkP and Tera. To me, this was just as hard as the race as I could barely keep up with them.