Whew. Another tiring day. Slept hardly at all (yay jetlag, again) and woke up early with a sore throat! My favorite. Met up with the team bright and early and we headed out to Willow Park for the annual time trial. We did it on ~2 mile loop, each lap we increased the pace. Started at GP 7:30/mi, but it was in actuality ~7:10/mi and we did that for the first two laps. Then we picked it up to GP 7:00/mi (actually ~6:50/mi) for the next lap. These first few laps, I felt pretty terrible. My legs felt fatigued and my throat was really raw. As we started lap number 4, with 19 minutes left of the 60 minute time trial, coach gave us the ok to go as fast as we wanted. Jessie took off like she'd seen a pot of gold ahead and Kim made chase and I attempted to do something similar. I quickly realized that their pace was too much for me to take, so I made chase at a slightly more reasonable speed. A few minutes into this pace, I started feeling really good for the first time and kept pushing it (in hindsight, a bit too much) for the first 10 minutes or so. Then, my exhausted legs started doubting the 5:50/mi pace I'd been throwing down and pulled me back down to a really painful 6:10/mi pace as I prayed for the last 5 minutes to go by faster. Not so! That was possibly the longest 5 minutes of running I've ever done. But, I ended up running ~9 miles and came second to Jessie. It was hard, but fun in a strange way. I wish I'd chilled a bit for the first mile of the "fast as you want" section, but alas, it was still pretty great. After a long day of unpacking, repacking and traveling, I tried to loosen up my legs with a shakeout at our lodge for camp at Altamont. = Failure. I felt really horrid, with a splitting headache, fatigued everyplace and muchos congestion. (K3 395.5) | 