So, I have been sick for the last few days, climaxing yesterday when I could barely get out of bed in the morning and I ended up sleeping off and on until 2:30pm. After that the fever broke but I am still not 100% better. It was also cold this morning (27 degrees at the start) and due to a number of little things happening, one of which involved me leaving my timing chip at the finish 3 miles away and needing to return to get it, we barely got any warm-up in before the race started.
So, putting that into context, I ran my first race since the St. George Marathon and my stress fracture that kept me out for the better part of 2 months. Sasha and I knew that we were going to be the only 2 people in the race that had a real chance of winning it so we decided to pace each other the first mile taking 1 minute intervals and switching off who was in the lead. I took the lead at 5 minutes and Sasha decided to pass me around 5:40-5:50 into the race. He held this lead over me and slowly extended it to about 15 meters by the time we hit the 2.5 mile mark. During this time period I started to wheeze a little bit, and I was having trouble breathing normally, mostly due to the fact that I am still somewhat sick. With about .5 miles to go I decided that I needed to make a move if I wanted to beat Sasha and I realized that if I didn't do it soon, I wouldn't have enough time to catch him. So I put in a surge and caught him with about .4 to go and when we hit the marathon 26 mile mark I pushed it hard so that I could stay in front for the last .2 miles. I could hear Sasha behind me as he started making a move to try and catch me once more and I put what little I hadn't yet used from the surge catching him and from pushing it harder with .2 left into staying in front. This ended up being enough to win, and I came across 1 second in front of him. After the race I immediately started feeling a good deal of chest pain and congestion and I started coughing up a storm. It was rather painful for a couple of minutes, but once I had cooled down somewhat the coughing and chest pain as well as a headache subsided. After this I paced Josse to a very close win in the marathon, a race in which she didn't pass the second finisher until they had already hit the 26 mile mark, following which Sasha and I ran back to our cars to finish up.
| 