Yeah, I am getting faster, but the problem is, apparently so is everyone else! I did a little race time comparison with this past Sunday's 10K and the same race from 2004. I ran more than a minute faster this year, but placewise was the 35th woman as opposed to 32nd last year and 11th in my age group, where I was sixth last year. Plus, my time from this year would have made me the 27th woman and 5th in my age group. Ah well, no point in fixating on mighta-beens. An encouraging little tidbit though is the fact that the woman who ran my this-year time last year... Sunday, she ran under 37 minutes. She's also like, a decade younger than me, but who's counting.
After the race, my team had our annual holiday party on the lower east side. A couple on our team has a cool loft space down there and they generously host the event every year. Talk about real estate envy... The coach gave out all sorts of silly awards for all sorts of random things and I managed not to win even one! It's too bad because he was handing out boxes of Whippet cookies and I really like those. Even though he left me cookieless, I presented him with a cartoon I'd drawn of one of the running stories he likes to tell about a former team member who cut the course in Boston and pretended to have run under three hours. I was actually pretty pleased with how it turned out and might include it as part of my portfolio if I end up applying to the MFA illustration program that I liked at SVA.
This morning was another cold one and I didn't even try to motivate myself to go outside to run. That might be vaguely excusable if I would at least bike or do sit-ups, but no, I just curled up a little tighter under the comforter and slept another hour. This can not continue. There's only one solution. I need to go find a nice long beach with palm trees and continue my training there.
