Be It Resolved

My apologies to my regular and semi-regular readers; my running has dropped off since my last race on December 1st, and the blogging even more so. Have no fear, I am as resolved as ever to meeting my running goals for 2008 and look forward to blogging much more frequently when the race season begins. For now, there is certainly more than a little off-season apathy going on here, coupled with plenty of seasonal- and career-related distractions. But also lingering back there is my fear that my left knee is as messed up as ever. I had a great training month of October, but a non-running injury to my left knee really slowed things down in November and the pain was still present on the climbs at my December 1st race. Now I’ve only run a couple times this month so far, and have another 5k lined up for December 31st. Appropriately enough, it’s called the Resolution Run. We’ll have to see how the knee holds up. Either way, I’m expecting an off-season type of performance but hopefully completing the race will give the ‘ole motivation a little boost.

Santa Shuffle 5k Mini-Report

Woke up today with my back feeling much improved, and decided I was ready to give today’s 5k race a shot. Got to the event site and there were over 500 runners, most of whom were dressed in elf ears, Santa hats, or jingle bells. This was a multi-city event being held across the country, and there was a 1k walk as well. The unfortunate thing was they decided to let *all* the 1k walkers do their thing first before corralling the runners into the chute. This resulted in hundreds of runners jumping around in sub-freezing temperatures (with a light dusting of snow for good measure) for a good half hour while waiting for the walkers to finish. Nothing against the walkers here, that’s just poor organization. I felt like whining with the other runners that this was “the worst organized event I’ve ever been to”, but then I realized that even though I’ve only done 6 races, I’ve heard that said each and every time by some wily road warrior or another. So this just made me laugh – every race is the worst organized! Yahoo, let’s go!

The bottom line: back was a little tender, knee hurt a bit on the uphills, fought stitches from eating too soon before race time, two walk breaks and a nothing-to-brag-about 28:04 finish that still felt like one heck of an accomplishment given the disaster this past month has been.