Not So Fast...

So I got a humbling lesson at the Rat Race 5K. I'm not so fast. I should have already known that. I ran 11 seconds slower than last week. Not that I was expecting anything big, just a few seconds faster would have been nice...

Wah, wah, wah. I sound like one of thsoe whiny nerdy road racers talking about all the excuses why they didn't hit a PR during their race. And they give a play by play breakdown of their 5K race that takes as long to spit out as the race took to run.

So I'll spit it all out, I can come up with some whiny nerdy excuses: I think this course might have been a little slower given the half mile or more of washboard dirt road during the second mile.

I think the milemarkers were off. At least I hope they were, or it means I have no concept of pace. 7:14, 14:34, and 23:21 at the finish line??? Weird. I know I wasn't going 8 minute pace that last mile. I actually felt pretty good the whole way and I know I didn't slow down.

Ault smells like sheep. I think it should be renamed The Sheep Race. The race was a fragrant mix of the smells of sheep, cows, water treatment plants, irrigation ditches, and cornfields.

No matter what excuse, the kicker is, even though I won my age group (40-49), I got sharpei'd. Bad! Someone in her 50s beat me by over a minute.

This is humbling, but it's very good for me. It will teach me not to expect to improve unless I do the speedwork, so I guess it's time to get going on that.

The good news? The hamstring didn't bother me at all. Maybe the massage worked. The hip is still sore, but I don't feel that on the run, only afterwards.

And it was a pretty sunrise.

I have to find the next 5K. Next weekend I work, so it will have to be after that. And I have those two weeks to fit in some real speedwork. Now I just need someone to kick my butt into doing it.

Joining the Rat Race

Australian Shepherds need to be under your feet at all times, including when you're getting a massage.

I've been dealing with this soreness on my left side, mostly in my hip and hamstring after I run. I finally convinced Dennis to give me a massage. He went to massage school, he has a table, he knows how to do it, right? But this princess needed to do more convincing and begging. So I made one of his favorite meals for dinner, and I bought him some good beer, and I guess that was enough.

He set up his table in the man cave, the basement, and went to work on me. He's such a good Australian Shepherd dad, stepping around the girls, who like to look up at me when I put my face down the hole in the headrest.

I'm hoping I can shake loose whatever is stuck and is causing all these annoying tweaks. And run a decent 5K at the Rat Race in Ault tomorrow. Decent is relative. Let's just say I want to run faster than I did last week. I know I haven't been doing any speedwork. But I want to run faster. Maybe it's too much to ask, but tomorrow I'll find out. It's supposed to be an accurate course.

Here goes the second week of my 5K training for 48 Hours plan. At the brutally early time of 7:30 am I will run the Rat Race 5K in Ault. I have to leave the house by 6 to get there with enough time to warm up and sign up. Not even enough time to make coffee. It will be a Starbucks Via morning.

Ault was a little town on Highway 14 going east toward Nebraska. But it's growing and is a bedroom community for some of the rat race. I haven't been there in a while, haven't ridden my bike over to that side of I-25 and gone north of Timnath lately.

Another 5K-induced moment of truth. The faster I run, the less I suffer, right?