Notes
5th Season 8k. Definitely the worst race I have had in years. I started out feeling pretty good and running my own pace. I went through the mile around 5:20 feeling good and was hoping I could pick it up the second half of the race. Then my back started to get really tight. The same feeling I had on a run last week when I had to stop. I'm sure that is partly from lack of fitness but I'm not in bad enough shape that 5:20 pace should feel that hard. I still made it to the 2 mile with the same group I had been running with but I could tell things were starting to feel bad. The next mile I basically let the wheels fall off. I was trying to get my back and core to loosen up and was dealing with a lot of people passing me. The 4th and 5th mile are all basically downhill. I was able to get rid of the pain but as soon as I tried to pick it up a little more it would come back. So I basically just finished the race at the same average pace. Not many people actually caught me the last mile, but a lot of guys beat me that have hardly, if ever, beaten me in a race before. This is always tough to handle.
I know I'm not in great shape due to injuries and motivation lately (mostly injuries causing lack of motivation), but I also think I am in much better shape than 27:45. The last two years I have run ~26:30 and I wasn't in great shape for those races either. I figured I would run 26:30-27:00 on an average feeling day. I still think that is probably true. My foot is causing more problems again so I really would like to get that under control. If I can do that I think I need to try to up the miles again. I don't like the steady decline I've had the last few months so hopefully I can get it back together. The positive side is that I ran some very solid races at the end of last fall off of average training as well so I'm confident I can get it back.