dedication, perseverance, self-discipline

Well, my calf felt better today than on Saturday, which is good.  I have decided that the discomfort was coming from the head of the calf muscle being too tight, and thus putting excess pressure on the muscle insertion near the achilles.  So, I spent a lot of time today massaging the muscle and stretching it out.

I ran with the normal group this morning.  We finished 10 miles in 1:19:23.  My calf felt a lot better today than it has been, but somewhere in the latter part of my run it started to act up again.  So, not perfect but getting better.  Hopefully it is good enough for me to race on Saturday.  We will see.

Easy run.  Nothing special.

I ran with the same group as usual, but I didn't do the entire run with them because I didn't have the car, so I split off early and ran home.

Again, same as normal for today.

I ran the winter series 10k this morning.  Like last time, Seth was my main competition.  This time however, we were also competing against the wind and snow, and wet slippery conditions in general.  We ran a little less than 3.5 for a warm-up, and then headed to the start line.

The race started with a minimal, but almost non-existent tail wind.  Snow was also coming down, and it was slippery.  So, we started off slowly hitting the first mile in about 5:28.  There was a pack of 5 of us, including Sasha, myself, Seth, Bryan Summers (lives in Salt Lake I think), and James (Fiddy on the blog).  Sasha dropped back after the first mile, and the rest of us kept up pretty much the same pace.  We hit the second mile in 5:29, and the third mile in 5:30.  I think that about 2 miles in that a decent tail wind picked up, because the snow stopped, however we didn't notice it until after the turn-around.  We hit the turn-around in 17:06, and promptly hit a nasty wall of wind that slowed us down from that point until the finish.  The fourth mile was a 6:08, followed by a 5:55.  Bryan dropped back after 4 miles, and James dropped back between 4.5 and 5 miles.  From around 5 miles in Seth and I slowly picked up the pace.  I led most of the way as Seth was content to just take it easy and kept slowing down.  I knew that if it came down to a finishing kick over the last half mile or so that I would probably lose, so I felt like I had to lead if I wanted a shot at winning.  With a half mile left Seth took off, and I followed.  We hit the sixth mile in 5:35, which was really fast considering the snow and wind.  After Seth took off, I started to slip quite a bit on the snow.  I am not sure how he was able to go that fast given the conditions.  I felt like my legs were strong enough to go faster, but that I couldn't because of how slippery it was.  Anyhow, Seth finally dropped me right around the 6 mile mark, and he finished 2 seconds ahead of me (I made it from 6 to the finish at about 5:23 pace).

Anyhow, it was a decent race given the conditions.  I can't say that I enjoyed it much, but it was a good workout.  During the first 5 miles I really felt like I could maintain the pace I was going forever.  I felt strong, but I realized that it was too risky to try and run alone.  I felt like I couldn't go any faster during those miles because of the snow, yet somehow I was able to speed up quite a bit the last mile.  I also think that running in front for so long hurt me, but I really don't know if the outcome could have been changed if I would have slowed down in order to let Seth lead, because he still probably would have out sprinted me.  Anyhow, hopefully the weather is better for the 15k in two weeks.