Running:
Last week:
This week:
"I want you to pray as if everything depends on it, but I want you to prepare yourself as if everything depends on you."
-- Dick LeBeau
Clive, did the heat Friday night (even though the temperature was in the 70's the dew point was a miserable 70 Friday night) get to you or did the delay in the race throw you off? How was the footing (especially around the cone at the halfway point)?
Rob
Mostly, it was the 24 hours before race time (or maybe the 10-12 weeks) that did me in. A stressful and draining 5-hour THU evening thing, not much sleep, 10hrs of stressful work, and almost an hour of driving in a thunderstorm. It was raining during my warmup, which felt great and boded well. But the rain let up by 1.0-1.5mi into the race, though, and it was just low 70s and 100% humidity from then on.
I'm fairly methodical, which works well for training and for longer races. But for a 5k, I need to learn to put myself out there and risk blowing up. I've been unable to do that when I've approached it generally, so lately I've taken the more specific tactic of targeting a fast time to the 2mi mark, then hanging on and/or spooling it up from there to the finish. China Grove was the race where I finally hammered to the 2mi at a pace that I didn't think I could maintain (but was going to try hard to!).
Unfortunately, a couple guys I know who I expected to run 18:50-something were ~20m ahead of me at about 2mi. I pressed the pace to ~6:00/mi to close down the gap before we got close to the finish, and my legs tolerated that effort for a little bit before going over the line right at 4km.
I'd said elsewhere that it's been a shitty spring. Lots of stress at work; lots of stress at home; and more missed workouts than ever. And it showed.