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October 04, 2004
Confidence Builder
For the past three weeks, my body has felt less than stellar. Recovery was taking quite a bit longer than expected. There were flashes of normalcy, but for the most part everything felt like a bit of a struggle. That all changed today.
Since a race is on tap for this weekend, and a race that I'm trying to do something in, this week is a bit of a cutback week. The nice thing about this race is that no matter what I do in it, it'll be a PR. I've never raced at this distance before. For the past two years I've done the Tufts 10K on Columbus Day, but I didn't have anyone to go up with this year and we don't have Columbus Day off from work. It would've been cool to go up and meet Becky and Alison, but Alison'll be out of town too.
During the warm-up tonight, the legs still felt on the tight and stiff side. The ankle was fine all day, but the plantar fascia on my right foot was a bit tender which is not a big deal, just need to work on stretching some more and a bit of ice. I made the decision not to wear flats tonight on the track since my body hasn't been feeling all that great recently. The workout was supposed to be 400s, but J told me on Saturday not to do them this week with the race coming up. I decided to do 4 x 800 with a 400 jog. I ended up running with this really annoying guy who I *really* hate to run with. He's the kind of guy who will sit on my shoulder for the entire workout and then try to kick it in on the last 200 of each repeat and then let it all rip on the last 200 of the last interval. He has no shame in letting someone else do all of the work for him. Most of the guys I run with will take turns with who does the work, but not this guy. I hit my 800s in 3:02, 3:01, 2:59, and 2:57. They didn't feel all that hard. As I've stated before, I tend to do my recovery on the quick side, so my 400 jog was right at 7:00 pace. The annoying guy does have a hard time keeping up with the faster recovery. One note: the 800s were all about 2 seconds faster than what my watch said. The track we run on is at this ritzy private school and the CFO of the school puts these barriers up on the track. Sometimes they are up all over the track, sometimes there are only a few. Tonight there was one barrier up that forces you to run out in lane 4, so you can run on the inside for most of the lap, but then you have to veer off to the outside to get around this barrier. When they are up all the way around the track, we have figured out that it adds about 5 seconds per lap at 6:00 pace.
I feel so much better about the race this weekend after this workout today. One day this week I'll do a workout similar to what I did a few days before the PDR with 200 striders around race pace.
The new job situation is looking pretty darned good. I need to find copies of transcripts. They'll take unofficial copies, but I can only find one from grad school. I think that I'll just order an offical from undergrad since they're going to need that anyhow. I have to call back the woman from HR who called while I was out at the track tonight.
I must say that I am thoroughly enjoying my candy corn!
Posted by Blondie at October 4, 2004 07:52 PM
Comments
i just stopped by to check out your blog and i wanted to let you know that i am eating candy corn right now!!! i am totally addicted. anyway, best of the luck with both the race and the job situation. i am keeping my fingers crossed :)
Posted by: bridget at October 4, 2004 08:45 PM
Yeah, too bad you won't be here in Boston this weekend; I plan to watch the race although I'd rather be racing it! Just don't think it's a good idea yet...I'll shoot for next year. Hope the rest of your week continues well!
Posted by: becky at October 5, 2004 10:53 AM