Friday & Saturday were spent in Cincinnati with my sisters. We are really close but live in separate cities so whenever the opportunity for a get together presents itself we jump at it! Good food was shared, shopping was done (three cheers for IKEA!) and quality time was enjoyed. It was a quick visit but certainly better than nothing.
I had 10K planned for Sunday and kept wavering on what to do. As I've complained about at length, my foot has been bugging me a lot lately but oddly it tends to feel better the more moving around I'm doing. The weather forecast was not looking too stellar (cold and a good chance for snow) and I didn't think I wanted to deal with that, so I ate a not great dinner of a side salad and curly fries at a super late-for-me hour (and two beers, whoops!) and stayed up far too late. Still, I set my alarm for 6:22a (on a Sunday!) just in case.
When it went off the next morning I popped out of bed and just kind of went into pre-race autopilot. Toast in toaster oven, add PB + coconut, drink lots of water, use the bathroom, check weather.com obsessively, layer up, find headphones, throw shot blox in pocket, out the door. I feel like I hadn't even decided to run yet and somehow I was already doing a warm-up jog over to the starting line! My foot felt a bit sore but significantly better than I imagined so I was feeling pretty good and stupidly thought "maybe I can nail that sub-50 I had originally wanted despite not running regularly for the past two weeks!" (no, no you can't).
The course was set up for a 5K, 10K + 15K so it was just a repeated 5k loop. I knew if things got bad I could just bail after the first lap but also kind of knew I was too stubborn to do that. Before I knew it we were running! I went out way too fast (always a problem for me) and had a lot of different aches and pains throughout. My foot hurt a bit, but also my less than trained legs, my lungs dealing with the freezing cold air and my soul (ha!) because running felt HARD. Our city is pretty freaking flat but I swear we ran up every "big hill" we could. The elevation data from the run was insane. Those hills BURNED. They aggravated my foot and I was just not prepared for them, to make it worse I knew I'd be seeing them again on lap 2. Besides hating the hills, the entire race was seriously a blur. All of a sudden we were at the evil (GIANT!) last hill before the finish line, I killed it going up and barely thought I was going to cross. But I survived!
Splits:
Mile 1 7:53 (!!!)
Mile 2 8:26
Mile 3 8:34
Mile 4 8:37
Mile 5 8:41
Mile 6 8:38
0.26 9:05 (ha, I really wanted to die)
My official time ended up being 53:03 (avg. pace 8:30!) and I can't be disappointed in that. I wore my medal proudly as I pounded chocolate milk, inhaled a banana and stumbled back to my car. I iced, elevated and planned to rest but then I got called into my second job. I was happy for the extra money but 5.5 hours on my feet was pretty rough. I'm recovering today but feeling pretty good overall. I hope to ease back into a regular routine this week and just give extra attention to my foot.
I'M SO HAPPY I GOT TO RUN :-)
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