Hey guys. We're on the advent of finals week, and my last week as being a Sophomore. I move into my house on Thursday, and I have one more week at 69mpw, two at 70, then its taper time. I'm super excited. I don't understand why finals week is a big deal for everybody. It seems like everyone on this campus goes crazy when the calendar hits May. I won't lie, I've been obscenely busy too, but hey, thats college life. I dunno, the way I see it is if you manage your time effectively, don't do anything stupid, and take good notes, you'll be okay. But then, I'm also not taking bio, engineering, chemistry, those types of hard classes. For me, finals week is the least stressful weak of the year. Any week I don't have to wake up before 6 everyday and have one class a day is awesome.
So running. Running has been awesome lately. I'm already up to 150 miles this month, which is 20 more than April already and 50 more than March. This last week though its been tough to get excited about any of my runs. Last week it was in the low to mid 40's and raining every day. It was downright depressing. I may have just hit an all time low there. However, the weather seemed to take a turn for the better on Saturday and its been in the mid 70's ever since. I did an awesome 17 mile long run on Sunday that I'll post, but I think I'm going to do that this weekend too, assuming I'm in St. Paul and not Edina. I was actually supposed to do 16, but I couldn't pass up that nice of a run on such a nice day.
In terms of race reports, I ran two this week. First was the Twin Cities 1 Mile, which was run down Nicollet Mall on Thursday, may 13th. Before the race I ran a quick mile, mile and a half with Andrea, and then took the St. Thomas bus to the Minneapolis campus, and ran the three quarters of a mile or whatever to the start line on 3rd. Saw my running club on my run there, most of which were hitting the bars. I was running the 29 and under open wave because even though I signed up with the TC Running Club, Twin Cities in Motion finally got smart and realized that I couldn't actually compete with them since my USATF membership ran out last year. I thought it was worth a shot though; it got me a discount on my Get in Gear registration.
When I got to the start line, I did a couple striders and a little more short and fast stuff. Too much running? Who knows, but that would probably be a big factor in my poor performance. Before I get to the race, lets get to the weather. It was low 40's on race day, with a pretty sharp crosswind once you got past 10th street. I was actually feeling pretty good when the race started, I moved up into like the third row of people in the start area. I went out way too fast. I went out with the chase pack and went through the half mile in 3:10 and fading. As expected, I flew through the 10th st. intersection and died. Except I died harder than I thought I would. I was standing still and getting passed left and right, or at least that was what it felt like. Fun's over, I had to gut it out from that point on. I finished in a respectable time I guess, 7:04, but I got outkicked by everyone and their mothers in the chute.
The second race I ran on Saturday was the Autism 5k at Lake Harriet. Note that I said I ran it, I didn't race it. I ran it with Andrea, the girl I took to sweetheart, as well as her roommate and their friend. We got there at 8:00: 8:15 maybe? I didn't have a watch on; I purposely left it in my dorm. Throughout our runs, I could tell that Andrea was worried about hitting a certain time, which is a path to injury for all new runners. Its pretty simple- you push yourself too hard and get injured, and then lose interest in the sport altogether. Even so, I was planning on racing this one (and winning it), so I had myself chip timed. That worked well because since I ran with Andrea the whole way, her time was the same as mine; 38:33. Andrea's roommate and her friend Lucas took off on us a half mile in, so we were alone most of the way. The pack really thinned out over the first mile, there weren't that many people in the race. We talked about love, life and setbacks (that's a line from an Atmosphere song; we talked about running mostly and the various setbacks she had with it. I did a couple rudimentary gate analysis too, and figured Andrea was in a neutral shoe whereas she needed support, and her roommate needed a neutral shoe. (she wasn't wearing running shoes) I think she's going to take me up on getting a new pair of shoes too, which is kind of cool. I looked at the results the next day- the winner (and the winner of my age group) ran a 17 something. That hurt, I guess, because I knew I could have won that race easily. I could have easily been polishing a trophy right now. That got me thinking though- there's more to life then medals and recognition. What are medals anyway? Just symbols of memories in a sense. That would be cool to look at for a while, but all luster fades over time. I don't know, to me, a trophy can't hope to replace those 38 minutes. Maybe I'm romanticizing a little bit, but is it a problem if my slowest 5k turned out to also be my best?
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