Long time no blog

Hey guys, sorry I have been missing lately.  My excuse is that I'm changing job locations, so I'm not going to be at a location where I have internet at my disposal all day anymore.  I used to work at a pharmacy in South Charleston, which is crazy busy, then started working at the new Charleston location, which is super slow.  Well, now I'm taking the assistant manager position at the South Charleston store, so I will be working there all the time and won't have internet.  The internet thing sucks, but that's the price I will pay for being asst. manager and getting a raise!

I ran a 5k yesterday morning.  It's the first race I have run since the 15 miler on September 5th.  I really didn't have a goal in mind.  Considering I've only been running 2-3 days per week and have had a hard time with speed work, I really anticipated having a pretty bad time.  But, I thought what the heck, I just like running the local races and getting the race t-shirt, lol.  Earlier this week, I did a speed workout at the local high school track.  My goal for that workout was to keep an 8:45 pace during the speed portions.  Surprisingly, I did it with ease.  I did a 3x800 with 400 recoveries.  Not a big workout, but something to get my legs moving at that speed again.  That gave me a lot of confidence back, since I have been having a horrible time with speed lately.

For the 5k I originally thought about treating it like a speed workout because I didn't think I could maintain the 8:45 pace I did during my track workout.  But, when I got there they had race bibs and the little timing chip and everything.  They never do that for the small local 5k's, lol.  I guess they just wanted to be high tech and have the results posted quickly.  Basically, when I saw that they had race bibs and timing chips my strategy changed.  I kind of felt obligated to give it my all.  I warmed up for about 3/4 mile before the race was suposed to start.  Then they announced that they were running behind about 10 minutes.  Crap!  I hate when that happens.  I decided to keep warming up, then luckily I came back right as they were starting the runners.  The weather was about 55 degrees and wet out.

I started out with an 8:30-8:45 pace and felt pretty good.  At the halfway mark I started to get a little tired.  I thought about walking for a few seconds at that point, but for some reason I didn't.  I was passing people the whole time, picking them off one by one.  This made me not want to slow down, so I just kept pushing.  When I got about a little over 1/8 mile away I saw the time clock.  It was about 26:50 or so, and I knew I wasn't going to PR (my PR is 26:55).  But, I started kicking really hard and finished in 27:11.  It was funny because this woman in front of me looked really shocked as I busted it out at the end and passed her.  For some reason I can pick it up at the end, even when I feel like dying, lol.  Needless to say, I was so surprised at myself.  Driving to the race I thought I would be lucky to finish in 29 minutes, but I did very well.  I only finished 16 seconds off of my PR!  I guess I found my speed, it just took some time and some rest. 

There are quite a few 5ks this fall, so I'm going to work on improving my time.  The next one is October 31st.  That's just two weeks, so I'm just going to shoot for less than 27 minutes.