Winding Down

It's that time of year again... taper time! I have 14 days until my final race of the spring and my legs are beginning to feel the strain of it all. Normally, I wouldn't feel too tired yet, but my mistakes I made after cross season are still weighing heavily on my legs. I think for the first time ever, I will take a full two weeks off after my last race.

Now, to the race. I am running the Sounds to Narrows (S2N) 12k on June 9th. My original plan was to go for the win that weekend. In 2011, I placed a narrow 5th (losing a place on the last, evil uphill) and that was off two weeks of light running following my break after track. I had thought that this year, by not taking my break until after, I would be able to be in great shape and win it all. Unfortunately, Bloomsday took a lot more than a physical toll on me. Mentally, I have not been in a state able to prep for a big race. Recently, I have been trying to get myself back into the swing of things and I am beginning to feel a bit better about it. My new goal is to place in the top 3. Depending on how I feel during the race, I may still attempt to capture the win, but I will leave the race happy and smiley if I get top 3. I felt good yesterday on my (short) tempo run, so we shall see how it all goes.

In other news, one of our recruits for next year just won the 4A State title in the 800m AND set a new state meet record. Also, our other big acquisition seems to be getting healthy and back into training, so we are very excited for the future. Look out for us in indoor, after we all finish redshirting cross. We might be turning a few heads this next year ;)

As always, run happy!

Post-Bloomsday Run Down

First off, I would like to say the pun in my title was not intentional.... but I intentionally did not change it.

Anyways, it has now been over 48 hours since I raced the Bloomsday 12k in Spokane and I have had a lot of time to reflect on what happened Sunday morning. Needless to say, I am not happy about my performance. Despite my promising work-outs the past few weeks and the solid times I've been posting on the track, I fell well short of where I should of been and ever shorter of where I wanted to be in the race. For instance, a few weeks back I did a work-out of 6x1000m. I averaged a 2:58 for the work-out, with the fastest being 2:51. My goal pace for the race was 3:10/km. That is a 12sec/km difference. That's a significant difference. I should have easily been able to drop off 12 seconds per kilometer and ran 3:10 pace, easily. But I didn't. I have looked back to try and see exactly what might have contributed to my poor performance and I have been able to think of a few.

1. Lack of recovery from previous weekends 5k/steeple double

Honestly, I think I should have stuck with only the 5k the weekend before Bloomsday. A big effort to earn a PR followed by a hard effort to simply maintain a decent steeple the next day took more out of my legs than I ever imagined. I spent the whole week feeling like I had tree trunks for legs. Although the work-out went well on Wednesday, I still felt bad and weights did not help. I took Sunday off after my steeple and did my long run Monday, but it did little to help me recover.

2. Trouble sleeping throughout week

Although I tried to sleep well, the truth is, sleep didn't come particularly easy for me last week. I got a good nights sleep in two nights before like you're supposed to, but the other nights were hit and miss. This could also contribute to my lack of recovery from the track double.

3. Morning race v. Night race

This entire outdoor season, all of my track races and work-outs have been run during the afternoon or evening. The mornings have been devoted to either easy shake-out runs or long runs (Sunday's only). It is possible that my body was not conditioned to be ready for a early morning hard effort and simply wouldn't wake up (more a theory than a solid reason, but I felt it was worth mentioning).

4. Insufficient warm-up

I did feel a bit cool and stiff at the beginning of the race. I could have done a few more drills and done them in a more thorough manner.

That is really all I could think of. Like I stated before, all signs really did point to me having a good performance, but I simply did not. Luckily, this is not the end of my season this spring. In 5 weeks I have another 12k road race to run, the Sounds2Narrows in Tacoma, WA. Last year I placed 5th there and this year, the main goal is top 3, with the secondary goal to win. This week is going to be an easy week to try and rest some more, then I will jump back into it, beginning my taper 3 weeks out. Hopefully I will show up ready to run this time, especially since this race is in my own backyard....