Destiny (aka Brightroom, Inc.) took care of me this race, providing one really nice race shot.  That’s as common as a unicorn and slightly more useful, so yay.

A bonus was that they surreptitiously parked a video camera at the 5k mat, so for the first time I have a candid glimpse of what I look like racing.  It was definitely jarring, like when you hear your voice on tape for the first time.  I’m not the fluid gazelle I imagine myself to be but I’m also not horrified or embarrassed.  That’s progress!

The last cool thing is just a fun, completely useless ego massage. Within the race I got an unofficial 10-mile PR (no biggie since I’ve only raced one back in 2008) but it turns out the time I hit, 1:10:19 according to the race results, comes out to an age-grade score of 80.04%.  It’s raining National Class!   Of course, that one doesn’t count but it’s great motivation to do shorter races.

Last Couple Days
I won’t go into detail but I’ve had a mystery leg thing that started a couple weeks before the race.  At first it was in my quad then shifted to my lower leg. No pain running or sitting but I can feel it walking or when I roll over in bed, kinda like a pinched nerve right at the top of the tibialis anterior.  Because I couldn’t pinpoint or poke it, I was Googling stress fractures and thinking the worst. At the start line, I hopped up and down on it a few times just to reassure myself that it wasn’t one and thankfully, I didn’t feel a thing during the race.  It was quite a downer in those preceding days though (and still is a weird worry).

With this in mind, I took the last 2 days off from running.  This morning, I still had some pinchyness but went on an easy run anyway to test it…no problems!  8 miles and it felt fine.  So I don’t know what’s up with it but I can only assume that since running is fine (I won’t be doing anything fast this week), it’ll eventually work itself out.

Race Week In Review
Since I didn’t post this on Sunday…

Monday: 10@8:31
Tuesday: 8.25@7:47 (3xmi @6:55) w/2min rests)
Wednesday: 6@8:30
Thursday: 5@8:19 (4 strides)
Friday: Off
Saturday: 4@7:58 (4 strides)
Sunday: 14.15@(race and 1mi warmup)
Total: 47.4 mi

What’s Ahead
Here’s one thing I’m thinking: “Oh no, now what am I going to do to get faster?  I’m doomed!” because I’m a fatalistic idiot from time to time.  But this is just momentary.  Sane Flo thinks it’s time to get her race hat on and go wild.  As in, do a race almost every week for the next 4 or 6 weeks, whatever I can find locally.  I think it’d be a fun alternative to quality work and I know it’d improve my racing chops.  I did this in my Spring Of Improvement back in 2009 and that might have had something to do with said improvement (cart or horse…who knows?).

This would start in 2 weeks when there’s a sweet 5K I really like, though it was short last year and I’ve emailed the director to see if they’re remeasuring.  At first I was thinking I don’t want to race anything that requires an asterisk after it, but then I started thinking more sensibly: last year at that race I won a $70 certificate for Zipcars and a gift certificate for Whole Foods, both of whom are sponsoring again, so it’d be worth it.  And also, if I do multiple races, an asterisk race doesn’t really matter, I just won’t call it a PR.  Because any race is more than the result, it’s an unparalleled workout that I could never replicate on my own and that’s the mindset I want to have.  This will get me over Athlinks self-consciousness and the preciousness that racing rarely creates.

So that’s it for now.  Later, my loves.

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