I’d like to polish the Knob more often, hopefully this is a start. I still have goals, and I thought it was beneficial in the past to recount them here, so I’d like to resume that habit. It’s tiresome to be so navel-gazing all the time though, so I’d like the Knob to branch out a bit. We’ll see how it goes.
First let’s recap recent events. I ran the Cowtown Half-Marathon in Ft. Worth on Feb 27th with several college friends. I trained pretty hard and had some excellent workouts, the best being an 18-miler with the last 6 under half-marathon pace. That told me I was ready. The race itself I’d count as a success, but more memorable was the weekend with the friends. So not only did i run a PR 1:17:40 and finish 10th overall, I got to have a sleepover with my fellow near 40-year olds.
Revisiting the race, I’ll just say that I ran hard from the gun, hard the whole way, and hard enough to puke at the finish line. A good course, the first mile downhill (5:35ish for me I think), mostly flat, a few hills around 10k, a slight uphill around 10 miles where a high school kid passed me, then a merge with the 10K runners for the finish where I put on a 1.1 mile kick (ha) and overcame the high schooler.
After the half I contemplated shutting down the training for the spring, so took it easy for the next few weeks. I think I even had a 15 mile week in there. But a few days before the Capitol 10,000 I decided to run and wasn’t expecting anything spectacular. I thought I might break 36:00 on residual fitness alone and that’s exactly what happened: 35:50 for 31st overall. My first two miles were around 5:35 while my later miles were 5:50ish. Oh well, it was a good painful.
So somewhere in there I decided to try and keep fitness through racing. I think the Cap10 was part of the plan, and I signed up for the Bun Run as well. I’m thinking that was a mistake as this week I’ve totally bombed my workouts. I even showed up for the bomb run, but there were no bombers, so I bombed solo, and boy did I bomb. I struggled to run five miles and ended up doing a lame fartlek/mile repeat workout. The Bun Run does not look promising. But this happens every year around this time, a hard crash after a Spring peak. When it happens it is not pleasant and you end up doubting your whole fitness future.
Anyway, if I ever recover my plan is to run either S.A. or Houston. I train better with looming goals so I think S.A. may be optimal since Houston seems so far away, across the holidays and into another year, but we’ll see how summer training goes. From there it’s not too far to the Masters division and I’d love to give that a shot for a year or two, but that’s getting ahead of ourselves.