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Shocking Joseph

Ha, shows what he knows... 40:14.

I'm not really sure where to primarily place the blame for not going under 40, but I don't want to beat myself up too much over what is still a healthy, competitive time that most people would be heavens-to-betsy thrilled with.

I started out planning to just stay with a teammate who has been running times comparable with mine lately, but I knew pretty quickly that the effort was a bit too much. I stayed pretty relaxed for the next couple miles after that and concentrated on running my own race, but the first big hill in the fourth mile just knocked me out. I recovered from that reasonably well, but ended up "sprinting" in my last .2 in 6:50 pace, so I couldn't have left much of anything on the course.
6:11
6:26
6:28
6:51
6:22
6:31
1:22
I guess my legs feel sort of dead from the beginning, but sometimes that feeling is more in your head than anything else. There was a lot of pollen in the air and I'm still coughing a bit from that, so maybe that was a factor. And I was out with friends for a birthday party until midnight last night, but I only had a couple of glasses of wine and still woke up naturally before 7 this morning, so I don't think that had much of an effect. Just a little bit of everything I guess, plus the random, unfathomable whims of this sport that sometimes decides that you've been using up more than your share of PRs lately and it's time to learn a little humility.

At any race, it was a great hard workout and I'll get over the 30 mile mark for this week, so maybe I can start feeling like a runner again after toying with the temptation to just stop training altogether for a while.

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Comments (4)

I maintain you're probably a little tired from the marathon--it's completely normal...that said, I would've still pegged you at sub-40, but you know, you did run a 2:56, so no need to feel too bad about anything IMHO.

Last year I ran a 3:10 and a 38:53 two weeks later. I'd take the 2:56 and a 40:14 three weeks later, however.

your report sounds a lot like mine...my legs felt dead from the beginning too!! I'd rather have had your time than mine though :) nice job!

Yeah, if you feel bad about a 40:xx 10k I'm going to come out to NYC and doing something non-violent to demonstrate my disdain for you :)

Tinman has this theory about mileage and endurance. He believes that slow twitchy people like you and me need a lot of miles to stay at peak form. We lose fitness quickly when our miles drop way down. Plus you're probably tired and carrying a couple of soup cans of extra weight. And maybe you just had an off day?

And yeah, I'd pretty much kill to run that fast right now :)

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This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on May 17, 2008 1:18 PM.

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