Every Race is an Adventure!

I ran the six mile serpentine route near my home this morning at an easy/moderate marathon pace effort in 47:55 (7:59/mi), with 8x100 striders mixed in miles 3 and 4.My splits were:

8:06

7:46

7:39

8:24

8:13

7:42

Mile 5 has a pretty good hill in it, but I'm not sure what happened to the pace during mile 4, which is flat. I think I just lost focus after pushing the striders pretty hard.

(Axiom 22.5 miles)

At noon I ran Eagles view with Nathan, Darin, David, and Merrill. I'd never met David or Merrill before, but Darin apparently knew them and invited them along. They are pretty decent runners because we had planned to take it easy but I had our finish time for the 5 miles as 39:04 (7:53/mi), and we were all pretty close together. That's pretty good for this big hill run. I feel good whenever we go under 40:00.

Of course, it's not quite Tom's 34:02 (6:55/mi) solo run on this course last Monday. I hope everyone's back next Monday, including Tom. I don't think any of us at work have seen Tom go all out since his recent training breakthroughs. I'm sure Darin could give him a run for his money, and I'd like to see Nathan take a shot at keeping up as well. You may notice my lack of personal trash talking, that's because Tom's blog numbers (miles and paces) really have me quite intimidated.

Larry only had about a half hour this morning so we ran 4 easy miles on the serpentine route. I was going to go a few more miles, but I'm pre-surgery fasting, and can't even drink anything after 7:45am, so I didn't want to overdo it. I decided to grab my golden retriever and run 1/2 mile around the block with her and then walk another 1/2 mile (so she could get her sniffing and pooping in). She's almost 9 years old but still has way too much energy. She drug me most of the first half mile, which we finished in 3:24 (6:48/mi). I averaged 8:37/mi for 4.5 miles.

My shoulder surgery is scheduled for 1:45pm. I hope it goes well and I can recover quickly and get back to running soon.

The shoulder surgery went well yesterday. I felt some nausea and dizziness last night and early this morning, but I've since dropped to one rather than two pain pills and I feel great, except for a little stiffness and minor ache in my shoulder. I'm sure the hydrocodone is doing its work and masking a lot of pain, but I'm surprised at how good I feel. I'm typing right now with no sling and feel no discomfort at

I was pretty out of it when the doctor was talking to me after the surgery, but Karen says he told me not to run for three weeks. Three weeks?!!! Is he nuts? Prior to the surgery he said that the only thing that would restrict me after the surgery would be pain. I could do almost anything without much risk to undoing what he did during the surgery. I'll talk to him again when he calls to check on me. I can't go three weeks without running.