TC 1 Mile 2008

Today is my one mile race. I’m not going to post this till I actually end up doing the run, but thought I’d at least have something started before I get to it. This will be my first official race this season too. I had a few others I wanted to or contemplated doing but for various reasons didn’t. This race I had a pretty high goal for myself…high school PR…yes, you read that right. I wanted to beat what I haven’t run since I was…oh…14 or 15…yes, I set my PR Freshman year I think…can’t remember for sure. But now, training myself, I thought to better that. Pretty ambitious! Of course that was before my heel issues, which had me take about 2 weeks off in April and now has me just slowly building back up so I have done none of the training that I wanted to. Hence an adjustment to my goal. Right now if I run a 6:30 I’ll probably be feeling pretty happy about that. Last years time was 6:19, good for 9th in my age group, but not as good as I would’ve liked to have had (last year I wanted to break 6, again no speed work due to many things). I’m also debating if I’ll run in the open category, or the smaller, for my age group, that I did last year and signed up for again this year (there is an option of running in any group and I might just run in one of the other age groups to have a smaller group and still not have to wait, it’s all chip timed so doesn’t matter, that’s even stated on the web site). It’s a 30 minute or more time difference between them though and I don’t really want to wait that long. I have things I do need to do tonight to be ready to head to my parents after work tomorrow…and I need to get to sleep early so I can get up and get to the gym to see hottie, I mean to get a workout in and hope that hottie is there!!

So I opted to run my age group wave again...and I have to say I'd like to order up the weather today for Twin Cities...race was around 55 or so degrees and no wind, a little cloudy...perfect. There were over 2600 runners there today. I did some warm up and wandered around and killed time till the race started. I even used 3 different bathrooms! Yeah...Anyway, lined up finally for my race wave and 3 minutes to start I realized I DID NOT want to run this race. Bad timing, I know...anyway, blow horn went off and we were off. This year they changed the course and we had a nice hill early on, but it was short enough and you run this fast enough you don't even notice. There wasn't split times at the quarter like they said, instead as I was dying trying to figure out how I was going to make, oh at least another half, I heard the splits at the half...I was just under 6 minutes there...WTF?? Uh huh...didn't feel like I was going that fast, but no wonder I was hurting. From there on it's a straight shot and you just pray to keep it up...I was counting down the blocks and praying for the finish. I saw the finish finally, no real kick left (not that I had built one up anyway) and crossed the mat...it was 6:14 or 6:15...so faster than last year. That shocked me. I'm not nearly as ready or in as good a shape as then...maybe it was the 6 miles I had done during the day before the mile last year that got me (and the 25 miles for the week by that point!!). Anyway, I know I have better in me...next time...My heel...hurt pretty bad all day. Not good. And it took 2 miles of warm up, some stretching and still was a little sore, but didn't really notice it during the race. I was burning at the end. Lungs still hurt and I fininshed an hour ago...that distance hurts!!