NEW DIAGNOSIS

I’m happy to report that I’m feeling a lot better. My new diagnosis after all this B.S. is that I have some VERY tight muscles – especially quads and calves – that are pulling “things” out of whack and causing knee pain and what I thought were shin splits. I took Evans advice and bought The Stick over the weekend and have been going to town on my legs.

Friday night (before buying the stick) I had a really hard time getting loose. I had to walk and jog before stopping to stretch, before finally walking, jogging and running. I managed a very slow 5 miles. Saturday I had a nice 12 mile run. 10 of those miles were on trails and I only saw 2 people that whole time. With Mother’s Day, I didn’t get my run in during the day. Instead I waited till Survivor was on and I hopped on the treadmill for 14 miles – nearly 2 hours.

Last Tuesday I was sure there was no way I’d be running Grandma’s. Now I know I can cover the distance. I just don’t know how fast. It seems like I missed a ton of training, as my last 4 weeks have been 32-36 miles. However, I did cross train quit a bit, so maybe I’m not in that bad of shape. Part of me wants to run as many miles as possible in the next 4 weeks before taking a week-long taper. With this recent cut in training, I can’t really see taking more than 7-10 days to taper. I haven’t really figured out what kind of speed workouts, if any, to include during the next month. Right now I’m just happy to be running again. I’m trying to get consistent and get into a groove.

My last post mentioned that Jim and Jenna were racing over the weekend. Jim ran 1:28 for his half marathon and was a little disappointed with that performance. Jenna was the 14th woman at the U.S. 25K Championships with a time of 1:34 – that’s 6:04 pace. That’s a very solid performance, but I’m not sure if she’s happy with it or not. A gal she beat by 10 seconds in a 10k two weeks ago, beat her by nearly 3 minutes.

Now that we’re getting into the race season and people are posting reports, I thought I’d (re)post my “stance” on commenting. Yes, I know we all want to get along and be positive and supportive. There’s nothing wrong with that, I just think there’s a better way to do it. When someone just mentions that they didn’t reach their goal, they’re not happy with their performance, etc. it doesn’t seem to make sense to say “great job” in a comment. Heck, someone shouldn’t have to say their disappointed either. If they run a 5k and each mile is 30 seconds slower than the last – they’re probably not happy with their performance.

I’ll use Andrew as an example since he knows how I feel. He was shooting for a sub-3 marathon but ended up running 10 minutes slower than that. If someone misses their half goal by 5 minutes, their 10k goal by 2:30 or their 5k by 1:15, is it still a terrific time? Those are basically the equivalent to missing a marathon by 10 minutes. If I miss a 5k goal by 1:15 it better be due to heat, wind, up hills AND a long course.

I’ve been trying to figure some of these comments out a little bit by applying math. Let’s say the average marathon time is 4:20 or roughly 10:00 pace. Missing a goal by “only” 10 minutes is about 20-25 seconds/mile. So maybe running 10:00 pace instead of 9:35-9:40 pace isn’t that big of a deal because you have more room to work with – meaning you have lots of opportunity to go faster. However, when you’re running low 7:00 miles, shaving those same 20-25 seconds per mile becomes a lot harder. This would be amplified even further for an elite runner finishing in 2:18 instead of 2:08. I doubt that runner would be happy with their outstanding performance.

Quote of the day:
“The ‘talk test’ was the greatest news I’d heard since I found out it was okay to eat pasta: If you’re out of breath, slow down. What a great deal?” – George Wendt, Norm from ‘Cheers’