Well, not a bad weekend I suppose. Saturday I ran the Cox Falcon 5k and finished 4th overall in a respectable 17:25 (5:37 pace). Actually, looking back through my old race results I was surprised to see it was my joint 4th fastest 5k ever! Maybe I would have smiled more had I realized? The race left my groin a little sore, but a slow 2.5 mile jog and some stretching helped ease the pain, as did a peek at the good old McMillan Running Calculator.
As you can see, I plugged in my 17:25 5k time and out popped a 2:49:47 predicted marathon time. Now that would make me sooooo happy, but it’s not just going to happen – there’s the small matter of 26.2 miles of focus, concentration, determination and sheer hard work to get through first.
I spent the remainder of Saturday with my wife Ally at a condo in the local Sandbridge Beach area. It was great to chill out, read, watch old British TV shows and eat and drink at the local Island Bar. Despite being just a dozen miles from home, it was the perfect getaway – the only thing that could have been better was the weather. Oh well…
Sunday was another lazy day at the condo, followed by a lunch date with our daughter before she headed back to college after spending Spring Break in Virginia Beach. A couple of hours later I figured I’d better go for my run. After all, the Shamrock Marathon was only a week away and there was still a bit of work to do. My planned workout was 6 miles easy followed by 6 miles at marathon pace. I changed things up slightly and after a brief warm up, ran 7 miles at marathon pace with a 60 second recovery between each mile. Once again, I experienced a painful groin on the faster efforts, but the pain eased during the recovery and wasn’t too much trouble in the cool down.
I’m sure with a week of easy running I’ll be fine; it’s more an annoyance than anything else at the moment. I’m able to run through the discomfort but naturally I’d rather be firing on all cylinders for the marathon.
Today’s run was just an easy 40 minute effort. I covered about 5 miles and focused on keeping the heart rate low and the cadence slow. Not many more miles left to log….