Tuesday, December 14, 2010

A Couple Races in One Blog

Well since Chuncheon a lot of my plans have kind of fell through. I came up with this crazy idea to run 2 marathons 3 weeks apart. Sounded like a good challenge since I couldn't find an Ultra for the end of the year. The original goal was to run 2 sub 3 marathons 3 weeks apart. Then reality hit and I was going to shoot for 2 Boston Qualifiers in 3 weeks. So I started the training plan for that and I had a lot of soreness. I ran a half the weekend after Chuncheon as a long training run for the week and just took in the sites and stopped and ate at all the aid stations. I hit the split I wanted and enjoyed the day. After that my IT band was giving me some problems, so I took it easy. I figured rest was better than an injury going into a 2nd marathon that soon. Race weekend was approaching and I still wasn't feeling great. I got a phone call about a bike race that was 70K and figured I would do that with less impact on the IT band. Attempts to get into that last minute failed so back to square one and running the marathon. Getting ready to leave on Saturday to head up there I get a phone call from work. 2 hours before leaving I had to be into work. So it just wasn't meant to be for me to run that marathon. I figured it must of been someone above looking over me.

When that happened I figured it was time to take a "break". I took a whole 8 long painful days off of doing absolutely nothing. I can't say it was great, because in all honesty I was going stir crazy. So to start things of right I did a 5K race on base after my 8 day break.

It was the Turkey Trot and they had a 30 pound turkey up for grabs. So of course I had to run hard, I mean it was a 30 pound turkey for just winning a 5K. I went out hard and was trying to set a new 5K PR, but it was cold and the body just wasn't feeling it. I split a good first mile and then after that I backed off a bit. Ended up 18:18 and was feeling pretty good with that time considering how cold it was and the break that I had taken.

Well I figured there was no better time than to get my first bike race in then this off season. I have been training with a CAT1 cyclist here who rides for the Armed Forces Team. We found a hill climb up in Seoul and headed up there to ride with a foreign cycling team and then do the hill climb the following day. Saturday turned out to be horrible weather, snow, sleet, rain, wind and COLD! It was pretty miserable but we got to pre ride what we thought was going to be the course. Sunday morning it was even colder than the previous day and the race started with a 12K warm up/neutral start. What really sucked was after the 12K they bunched everyone back up and we sat around for 10 minutes before beginning the hill climb. It was only 6K but it was brutal. I got put in my place and the little koreans gave me a lesson in climbing. Overall though I was happy to get my first bike race in and learned some valuable lessons that day.

I am going to close out the year with a 10K this weekend and then the focus begins for 2011. Some of you know what the plan is already and others may have seen it somewhere on here as well. This is officially week 1 of training for the big race in 2011 and things are going good so far. I will post a season recap and 2011 plans here in a few weeks. Big News is coming so come back and read!

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