Sometimes You're The Windshield, Sometimes You're The Bug!

I don't blog much if I don't have anything positive to say and the last three weeks have not been good as far as running. The sore muscle or pulled muscle or whatever it is has continued to bother me and limited my training tremendously since running seems to worsen it. I've also been involved in replacing the ceramic tile in our kitchen and entryway. Lastly, my two boys are playing soccer now and the oldest is in Cub Scouts so my plate is more than full.

As I often say, you get out of running what you put into it and the last three weeks have not seen me able put much into it, which is unfortunate because I was doing well. The dramatically reduced training was exposed yesterday at the Tornados Cross-Country relay. I ran the third leg for the Striders Mens Masters team and I was passed by two teams we were beating. In the long-run (no pun intended), we weren't going to win anyway, since both those teams beat us by 2 minutes and I know I didn't give up that much to the two, but I still felt like I let the guys down when they saw me take off ahead of those two teams but have them come in before me.

I'm leaving town Wednesday morning for a four day fishing trip and will have no opportunity to run other than getting something in Wednesday morning before I leave and maybe late Saturday night when I get back. Given that schedule and the shape I'm in now I may have to bag the 10 miler in Clear Lake in 2 weeks. I won't race if I'm possibly going to lay an egg.

Ouch!

I did the BENeezy 10K in Alvin this morning and the "ouch" refers to a couple of things - one being how I felt and two being how I did. Naturally the two are related.

My week leading up to this race went well except for a couple of things. I backed off the training so that I wouldn't be overtrained, had a strong week last week, hit my strength-training pretty hard, especially legs, and was well-rested. The two things that I couldn't check off though, were my weight this morning, which was 2.5 lbs. more than I like to race at, and the second area where I missed the mark was what I did yesterday, the day before the race. Professionally I'm in sales for a free-weight company (the fitness industry - I love it!) and yesterday I had almost 8000 lbs. of dumbbells being delivered to the new Rice University Student Rec Center. My sales manager and I went out there for the install and we realized early on that we bit off more than we wanted to chew. It was back-breaking manual labor for six hours and I managed to pull a muscle on my right side - probably the 135 lb. dumbbells we were having to throw around. I got almost eight hours of sleep last night but this morning the legs were dead and I was sore all over. To make matters worse it hurt every time I took a deep breath.

I knew at the starting line that the cards were stacked against me but figured I'd make the best of it and see how things went. I hit mile one in 6:05, which didn't feel bad, but I realized in mile two that the pain in my side and the dead legs were going to prevent me from any sort of competitive 10K this morning. This race allows 10K runners to opt out and just do the 5K, even during the race, but I was determined to, if nothing else, get in a good 10K tempo run. So that's what I i did. I hit the 5K mark at about 19:30 and was okay with that. I was already hurting enough due to the pulled muscle without trying to run red-line. I even had something left for the final mile and finished in 40:26 Not bad considering it was basically a training run other than mile one and mile six.