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Week 330
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Salutations, 50+ers! Well, another sub-par week of only about 17 miles to show for it. I did get a couple of 5-milers in and that 1-mile race. Looks as such:
Sun: 5 mostly easy (7:58/mi avg), but mile-4 was fairly hard (7:06)
Mon: off
Tue: 4.4 w/grass intervals of lengths 1.25,.5, and .5, all at around 6:45-:50 pace
Wed: off
Thu: 5.1 easy (8:20/mi)
Fri: 2.2 w/1-mile@6:15
Sat: Oops.
Missed the boat on running Saturday morning, which would have made it a good step forward. The day got busy with events given that our daughter will be heading westward this coming week; hard to fathom at this point. Grass intervals were nice. The rest of the group (much fitter than me) was doing cut-downs (1.25,1,.75,.5,.25). I joined for the first one, but it gassed me pretty bad, so I cut out and jogged longer and jumped back in for part of their .75 and then for their .5. Thursday's easy run felt harder than it should have.
The mile race on the harness racing track was a pretty fun evening. Racing under the lights with a full moon and beautiful fall weather and absolutely no wind and great sound system made for excellent conditions. I think that this can be worked into a bigger event; when groomed (which it was,) this surface is pretty firm and fast. If I were more in shape, I would have opted for spikes, but the racing flats did pretty well for this hobbyist. We have about 70 people come out and race. We broke the event up into 4 heats: community, competitive, elite women, and elite men (in that order.) Community was basically for walkers and those with seed times above 10 minutes. Elite women was seeds of under 7 minutes (5 women), while Elite men was for those that gave seed times of under 6 minutes (7 men). Competitive was everything in between. Obviously, elite is not really elite, but it did make for some fun heats. I seeded myself at 6:30, so I was in the competitive heat. My race went like this. I started out the first quarter too fast, running sub-6 pace by the quarter pole, I then panicked a bit that this was unsustainable and backed off too much on the back stretch running in the 6:40 pace range for the next 3/8th's of a mile. Then when I could see the 3/4 pole, I started to pick up the pace back to about 6:00 pace and finished fairly strong. The first place guy in the competitive class should have run with the elites and was way out in front running about 5:42. The guy in second was about 30-meters ahead of me at the 3/4 mark, and I almost pipped him at the finish, and honestly, I could have, but I just wasn't feeling all that competitive this night, and felt it would be kind of dickish given the festive atmosphere so I let up the last 20 meters (he was a cousin of a good friend of mine, and I think it meant more to him than it did to me.) (BTW, the overall winners were 5:51 for the ladies, 4:57 for the men)
Big props to Allen1959 for completing the marathon journey in such excellent form. I don't know if I could have persevered through those last few months. My hat is off to you. Kudos! Nice to see some good results from others, as well. And I wish good patience to those that are trying to come back from their setbacks.
OK, that's all I have. Hope you all had a good start to October. Always a great month for training and racing. I'll probably hit a few 5k's and hopefully race my way back into shape before December.
All the Best!