It's almost like running in Tuscany.
The family was still out of town for the first part of the week, and again I had all kinds of grand plans for fun workouts. Instead, I spent Monday and Tuesday with my plumber dealing with an emergency repair that kept me home both days. Fun times!
I did manage to get to the Team track workout on Tuesday night. I went early, hoping to do a few extra laps and get the lead out of my heavy legs. For about 36 hours prior to the workout, my legs had felt heavy and dull. Was it residual from Saturday’s run? Was it because I didn’t stretch enough? Was it dehydration? I couldn’t figure out the answer, and I also couldn’t shake the feeling as I ran. I blamed the continued feeling of ick (that’s the technical term) on the fact that my warm-up was paced with the wrong person and ended up being as fast as my tempo pace.
And then, about two hours later, the problem revealed itself.
Turns out that I had some sort of food poisoning, the origin of which could only be traced back to something I’d eaten about 48 hours prior. Once I recovered from that, my legs got the lead out, too. They had to be related somehow.
Blue skies and antique windmills.
With that out of the way, I had Saturday’s LSD run to look forward to: 8 miles through the vineyards in Livermore. I knew that it was going to be my longest run after coming back from my broken foot, and I was a little bit nervous about how it would work out. It’s not that I thought that I couldn’t go the distance, but I wasn’t entirely sure how my foot would feel afterward.
I paced myself with D, my customary long-distance running partner, and we ended up running a little bit long — 8.64 miles past cows, horses and vineyards at my I-could-go-all-day-at-this-pace pace. Sure, I was tired at the end, but I didn’t hurt. Dare I say that even the morning after, my foot felt pretty much normal? This is a very big deal for me, and it bodes well for race day and beyond.
So now I find myself faced with the question of pace for Nike. If I stick with the LSD pace, I’ll enjoy myself and not be half-dead after. If I let myself go at race pace, I’ll have a better overall time, but won’t be able to enjoy the more social aspects of the race (and believe me, there’s plenty of socializing with the slow crowd). My LSD pace would give me a PR by about 5 minutes. My race pace should give me a PR of somewhere between 15 and 25 minutes, depending on how much passing room I have at key spots in the course. What’s most important to me? I’ll need to figure this out in the next 8 weeks.
One last thing for today: I have to give a little shout-out to Beth. It was 6:30 AM on Saturday, and as I stumbled bleary-eyed into Peet’s for my customary large iced tea, she put two and two together and realized that I was the one who wrote this blog. I’ve never stumbled across a Betty fan in the wild before, so it was absolutely mind-blowing to meet a complete stranger who read this. How cool is that? Let’s just hope that I sounded somewhat coherent before the caffeine kicked in!
Tags: distance, nike women's marathon, pace, race, running, team in training, tempo run, tnt, vineyards
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