Yesterday was my scheduled 16er LR day, but I had to go to work in the morning, and much to my delight, I found out that the trials were being aired from 3-5pm on NBC, one of the 4 decent channels I can get. With some acne meds I started taking, I have to be careful about staying out of the sun, but I still need some light to run, so that meant that my run would be delayed until Sunday. My church has a 6pm Saturday service, which makes shuffling around schedules much easier.
The Olympic trials were AWESOME. Watching people run for 2 hours may seem like it can't be very exciting, but I'm telling you - I was on the edge of my seat the whole time. I'm a big fan of Ryan Hall and Kara Goucher. I got to see Ryan speak once (at the Country Music Marathon expo) and run at the Olympic Trials preview in Houston last year. I'm glad that I ended up running Houston last year instead of waiting until this year, since I'm in a vacation freeze for a project and had to work that day.
Anyway, they both seem like really nice people from the videos and interviews I've seen, and I was very excited for them. In the early miles, they didn't focus much on Kara, and it took me a while to ID her, but I noticed her necklace and was happy as she was in the mix early on and showed her stuff sticking it through the rest of the race. She had a baby a little over a year ago and didn't have as much training as she would've liked and caught a cold last week, so to see her do so well and get emotional at the end of the race almost made me cry with tears of joy, too! You can follow her blog at http://karagoucher.competitor.com/. That would be so cool to be able to race with friends like the trials women get to do. Two of them were college roomies, and two of them train together today. I guess having to go up against them, knowing that not everyone will make it is tough, but it would be a cool experience.
I meant to wake up at 6am so that I could start at 7am, a little before sunset, to avoid sun as much as possible. I didn't start running until 7:30, since it was hard to wake up after 7 hrs of sleep. On the bright side, my legs weren't stiff in the morning, which is unusual. I always thought I couldn't be a morning runner because of that, but I don't know what it was this morning. Didn't stretch yesterday, but I did stretch all of the other days this week, but that's normal for me. So I don't know.
FUEL:
I made oatmeal but then decided I was more in the mood for a banana. I have lots of bananas to finish, anyway. I normally don't practice pre-race prep much. I only do things like my warm-up shower, loads of decaf, and on-course gel and electrolyte drinks during rces. During training runs, I'll go without water, eat solids instead of gu or chomps (more recently, at least), etc. So I thought it might be useful to experiment a little. I watched videos of many Trials hopefuls talking about what they planned to eat race-day, and almost all of them had simple, bland foods like toast, a banana, and/or oatmeal. It must work!
I knew it would be cold, in the low 30s, plus potential windchill, and it would be dark for the first part, so I wore a long sleeve Brooks vibrant yellow tech shirt with a pocket in the back, where I stashed one glove (so that one hand could be free to do things like wipe my nose more easily) and my iTouch, in case I wanted to snap any photos. I ended up not taking any photos because I wanted to focus on the run. I wore my visor, New Balance shades (missing a nose piece), iPod shuffle, Under Armour calf sleeves (one thing I do wear for races that I don't normally wearin training), my watch (as a back-up timer), and my Garmin.
I started fast, maybe because of the downhill, with a 8:21 mile, but then I settled in. It was cold, and for the first few miles, I was really happy to have neck warmer / lower face mask to breathe through. I took a 100-cal mini Clif bar at the 6 mile mark when I got a little bit hungry and low on fuel, but I didn't end up needing the bottle of water + lemon juice + salt that I had carried to the 2 mile mark and stashed by some rocks. I drank a lot in the morning. I got tired at around mile 8 and thought for the slightest moment about cutting the run short, but I kept chugging. The first 10 miles always go by so slowly, but the last few always click by. It got warm in the long sleeve shirt later on, but not uncomfortably so. It had a zipper, so I was able to zip it pretty far down to increase ventilation. My iPod shuffle hasn't been recharged in a while, so I ran out of new content and had to listen to old stuff again, but it was just fine. I just need something to help me zone out at the end.
Splits> 8:38 b, 7:05 p short, 8:20 c, 8:03 p, 7:46 b long, 6:32 p s, 8:08 c, 7:51 p, 7:44 b l, 6:21 p s, 7:48 c, 7:51 p, 7:33 b l, 6:15 p s, 7:28 c, 7:19 p, 7:11 b l, 5:59 p s, 7:21 b l, 8:14 car.
I really picked it up in the last few miles. It's so wonderful to negative split.
16.8 in 2:29:37, 8:55 ave, 1304 cal.
My pace is about what I had hoped it would be. My last 16er (16.2) was at 8:51. I hope next weekend's 20 goes better than the last one.
Yesterday, in addition to work + watching the trials, I was feeling kinda tired and not in the mood for running. My throat was feeling a bit dry, too. It was probably best that I waited until today.
Towards the end of the run, I pictured myself spending the rest of the day reading "Running with the Hansons" or something like that, and it sounded really realxing. I ended up watching the post-trials interviews and spending like 3 hours refueling, and I'm about to take a nap. Maybe I'll read later.
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