Notes
Parkside 8k
Had a lot of expectations for this, which was to race well and hopefully make top 25. Had a good dinner, decent shakeout, and good breakfast. Warmup felt good/ easy and today looked pretty hopeful. The plan was to take the first hill conservatively and then just roll through the second mile so I could bag up people who were fading on the second hill.
Went out with Josh for the first mile, which was 5:30. Slow, but felt comfortable. I saw my other teammates in sight and tried to catch up to them. However, halfway through the second mile, my chest pain not only resurfaced, but felt twice as awful as the last time it happened, which was Augustana. I'll go into more detail about that later, but I'll continue on with the race. I started fading back badly and contemplated for a solid minute or two about dropping out because it just got so painful. Fortunately, some part of my conscience managed to slap me out of my lull and keep grinding. Even though I was getting passed in the second hill, including Somerfield, I was trying to just stay strong and just ignore the pain. Luckily, Around the fourth mile, the pain dulled out a bit and I was starting to make moves again. Rolled up a decent amount of people, tried to get Somerfield to go with me, but he didn't seem responsive. I overheard him telling someone else to catch up to Frintner, who was the next guy in front of me. I didn't know who it was, but I just kept keeping my groove on. The pain resurfaced again near the finish and I wasn't able to kick as well as I wanted. Oh and I also nearly threw up in the end.... for the third consecutive race...
Positives: Good start, decent comeback after the third mile, overcame a very bad and sudden pain that I thought would have been gone by now. Still placed 5th on the team and 33rd overall.
Negative: The pain absolutely threw me off my game and I let it get to me. That also proved that the cause is not weather-related since it was about 55 degrees when I raced. Had WAY too much left in the tank by the time I finished.
Overall: Despite losing my edge in the middle of the race, I can still come away from this race knowing that I overcame a great adversity during the race and did not give up/drop out. This course is not challenging enough for me to just quit so easily. I need to find out what is causing this problem.
* Side note, so about the chest pain, I'm just going to detail it out further. The chest pain is really just my chest squeezing really hard. During September, the chest pain was strongly correlated to my breathing, so whenever it got worst, so did my breathing. However, as the weather got cooler, the correlation became irrelevant. My breathing was absolutely fine but my chest still felt like shit. I originally thought it was just a weather relate medical condition, but it looks like it's a lot worse than I thought. So, it might be a medical or diet related problem. This might be a severe case of over-analysis, but even when I've had races where I went out too hard and died, I never felt like this, so I'm not trying to make excuses for my bad races, I'm just really trying to figure out how this all happened. Also, from Augustana to Parkside, the pain only resurfaced during the races, not during practice or workouts, which is even more confusing for my case. I'm really upset that I'm still having this problem this late into the season, and with Nationals a little over a month away, I can't push this problem away anymore. I'm going to McKinley first to reevaluate what's happening with my body and ask if it might be something with my stomach.