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.

Ramp Or Taper?

The physio rehab on my left knee has been going well. Still no definitive x-ray results though. Since re-injuring the knee on the 17th, I took a full week off with no running. The timing has been particularly annoying because I’ve got a 5k race on December 1st, so on the 24th I ran 30 minutes on the treadmill at a slow pace (covered 5k in 30 min). Then today, I decided to run outdoors on a flat gravel pathway but just for 3k. Given that I have run only about a third of my October mileage this month, I feel like I need to ramp up this week to get ready for the race. But at the same time, if my knee is still tender at all, I don’t want to wear it out. I think I’ll do one more training run on Wednesday and then take two days off leading up to race day. Something tells me I shouldn’t hold out hope for a sub-25:00 5k, but I did just set a new 3k PB of 14:21 today when I was trying to take it relatively easy. With any luck, there’s still some residual benefit to be mined from my October training even after I’ve been coasting all of November.

Fall Progress

Haven’t posted for a while, but have been keeping up fairly well with the running. I was back in Ontario last week, and took advantage of the opportunity to re-run the course of my fastest 5k (KSLO Canada Day Race in Burlington – stay tuned for the report!). My regular training run in Halifax approaches 9k and is very hilly, so I was lured by the flat lake-side pathway and stretched it out to a full 10k. Finished in just over 53:00 to my amazement.

With my confidence boosted by that run, today I got out to a flat course back home in Halifax (BLT 10k) and not only completed my second 10k, but also clocked my fastest ever 5k with a 24:57 first half split. Yahoo! Took a minute off my Burlington time from last week for the 10k too. With these two long runs under my belt, I’ve cracked 100k for the month of October. That’s my first time over that milestone, with the next closest being 78k in September. I guess the fall air really does help out!

Race Reports

I’m working on bringing my race report page up to date, and so far have written up my first two:

Daff-O-Dash 5k
Bread and Honey 5k