Wednesday, April 04, 2007

1:38:40!!

A 9:51 pace. I can’t believe I ran it that fast! It was awesome, I had a great time! I was worried, of course, that I would feel tired, or it would be too hard, or I would get injured (or my previous injuries would flare up) – but none of that came to pass. I felt great, it was a fantastic run. It didn’t feel like ten miles at all, it went so fast. I didn’t feel like I was struggling until the last mile really – I was just swept along by the huge crowd. I maintained an even pace, I didn’t slow much throughout the race, although I did walk for a couple of minutes at one water station, partly because my heart rate was running really high at that point, having run uphill for about a mile and a half. Then came the turnaround, and the downhill quick shot to the finish line.

I am SO happy with my time!!! I’m really proud of myself for completing the race, and amazed that I was able to do so well on the minimal training I actually did. The weather even cooperated – it was cold before the start, especially since everyone had to metro downtown and wait outside for busses to take us to the Tidal Basin and then walk almost a mile from the drop off to the staging area. But once we started running, I warmed up even a bit too much. It was that perfect 50-ish overcast coolness – great to run in.

I’m happy to be done, too, and now I can focus on some other goals and interests. It’s not like training was taking up a whole lot of time (since, um, I wasn’t… training…) but it is an element of stress – especially the last few weeks of 8/9/10 mile runs that take days to recover from. Speaking of recovery, after the race I ate SO MUCH, and went for a massage and pedicure (a super birthday present from my parents!!) and that was the PERFECT combination. I was not even sore on Monday, I felt fine. Like I had run maybe 3-4 miles on Sunday, not 10. It was hard not to go to the gym and lift, but I made myself take the break, just psychologically I probably needed another day of rest.

Some of the things I want to accomplish this spring are:

Hike something new.
Visit somewhere historical in VA (maybe Williamsburg?)
Take a trip to Florida to visit my sister.
See muscle definition in my arms.
Do 10 pull-ups in a row.
Run the George Washington Parkway Classic 5k with my coworkers.
Get confirmed.
Finish 3 books (Water Music by T.C. Boyle, It’s Not About the Bike by Lance Armstrong, and Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs).
Start a Roth IRA.

By the way, the cover of Newsweek is a series about living with cancer – in line with the Edwards/Snow announcements of their recurrences. The main article is by a man whose odds of survival were only about 50%, but I still related to much of what he wrote, like:

“With no standard of care for this disease, each expert I managed to get on the phone had a slightly different take on how it should be treated, which I later discovered is common with cancer.”

“Physically, I felt OK; emotionally, I was in hell. A woman I knew who was dying of breast cancer told me that none of the pain she was suffering at the end of her life compared with that first month and the daze of diagnosis.”

“Like the 10.5 million other cancer survivors in the United States, I experienced a bit of extra stress last week. When Elizabeth Edwards's breast cancer recurred in her bones and Tony Snow's colon cancer recurred in his liver, the cold fear that many of us live with every day crept a little closer.”

“The only constant in cancer is inconstancy; the only certainty is a future of uncertainty, a truism for all of modern life but one made vivid by life-threatening illness.”

Definitely worth a read.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Congrats on the race!

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