Endurance 5k and Indy Mini Marathon

            As most people that have run with me know, running really has not gone well this spring. Looking back on the calendar, I took a spill and fractured my knee cap 8 weeks ago. While I’ve been able to run, I’ve really had a lot of trouble with the knee which has affected my stride a bit and caused some pain. Because of the difficulties that I was having, I decided to back off my mileage and replace track workouts with tempo runs. While I was seriously considering backing out of the two races that I had already committed to, I decided to go ahead and run them any way so here are the summaries:

Endurance 5k

            In the 5 years that I’ve lived in Michigan, I believe this was actually my first trip to Ann Arbor. The Huron Hills Church puts on a very nice little 5k, and Nick Willis took it upon himself to organize a fast field. It really was a pretty cool race that I would highly recommend. It’s just two loops around a river in a pretty flat area. The first race was composed of 11 guys where the sole purpose was to try to run fast. Given that I haven’t successfully completed too many workouts this spring (I believe one since I fractured my knee cap), I really didn’t expect too much out of myself this race, and I was right. I came through the mile in 4:42, but things didn’t go very well from there. I really just progressively faded and ended up running a 15:21. The poor time was a result of my lack of 5k fitness and had absolutely nothing to do with the course. Despite not running particularly well, I really did have a good time and the race was put on well. Nick Willis has a lot of class and really did a great job helping out with the race. It also was pretty cool that he had his Silver medal from the Olympics along with him. I really do highly recommend this race.

Indy Mini 500

            Again, I really didn’t know what to expect out of myself in this race. My PR in the half is 1:06:36, but I knew that I hadn’t put in the work to run a PR time. I honestly thought that if things went well, I might have a chance to break 1:08:00, but I really didn’t know. I ended up running the entire race pretty much by myself. After 3 miles I really was thinking about dropping out. It’s really difficult to block out negative thoughts during races when a season just hasn’t taken too many positive turns. Needless to say, I decided that I just needed to make it to mile 6. I could hear Jerome’s trademark cough through about 5 miles, but I actually ended up running pretty well. My splits were as follows: 

5:06, 5:02, 5:08, 5:03, 5:09 (25:30 5 mile split…actually 2 seconds faster than my Shamrock Shuffle 8k), 5:05, 5:12, 5:11, 5:10, 5:11 (51:21 10 mile split), 5:08, 5:14, 5:14, :27 which put me at 1:07:26.

With about 4 miles to go, I really thought I was going to start negative splitting, but my foot began to cramp and my lack of workouts began to show. I really did struggle a bit coming in, but I managed to get through it. I really didn’t have too much more to give today, but I’m very happy with the result. While it wasn’t a PR, it really was about as good as I could have run at this point. I think it should be a good stepping stone as I look toward running a fall marathon. The Indy Mini 500 half marathon is a fast course, and it’s run extremely well. The night before the race was pretty cool and we had the opportunity to eat dinner with Frank Shorter. Again, he’s a great guy, and it was great to hear him talk, especially about running. While this may not be what he said to the exact word, he brought up a very good point regarding workouts.

There are workouts to show that you’re in shape and workouts to get you in shape.

It’s easy to try to run workouts to show you’re in shape, but the reality is, workouts are meant to get you in shape. Once you’re in shape, you’ll show it in races. In my view, workouts are meant to break your body down, but you also need to be running workouts that you can recover from both physically and mentally. I often run workouts to compare my fitness from previous years, and I really do need to stop doing this. While it’s ok to do it occasionally, I tend to do this on a weekly basis which definitely gets me in trouble. Frank Shorter did have a lot more interesting things to say, but I guess I’ll cut this blog entry off here since it’s getting pretty long. I’m pretty sure my spring racing season is over and I’m really looking forward to enjoying some pressure free base building training. It’s time to start building toward the fall marathon. I’m not sure which one I’m going to run yet, but I really think that I’m on my way to a nice PR.