The Results Rock

Well, if you read my previous entry, I was attempting to motivate myself. Did it work? I could give an quick answer, but what fun would that be? If I don't build up the suspense like one of the three million music, talent, and dance shows out there, I'd feel like I'm doing you the reader a disservice. Even though I intend to tease you, I promise there won't be any commercial breaks and I'll keep this show under an hour. For the record, if you can't tell based on the title, then something is really wrong with you.

In addition to the attitude adjustment I spoke about in the previous entry, I also started training a little different. I'm always joking around, but I'm saying this with a straight face, I've been running Fartleks (Fart-licks). Don't ask. I've got no idea where that term comes from and quite honestly, I really don't even want to know. I'm pretending it's the last name of the person who invented the technique and that it didn't come from a elementary school playground. The concept is fairly simple, run harder, then run relaxed, repeating at various intervals. The past two weeks, I've been mixing this technique into my runs.

Did it work? The day before the race, I posted on Facebook that I wanted to cut a minute off my time to get myself officially in the 19's. That was really raising the bar, that's a huge number to pull off. Last year, I would have been ecstatic to pull of 22's. Hitting 20's, felt like an unrealistic goal. Getting under 20, that's officially fast in my book. My post was more motivation, I felt confident that I could lower my PR, but would have guessed maybe 10 seconds. Prior to the start, I felt some tightness in my knee, the humidity was in the uncomfortable level, so I wasn't sure how the race would go. At the start, I felt good the first mile, but I also didn't feel as explosive as I did the previous race. I ran my plan, which was simply run as hard as could based on the conditions and even though there were some rivals around (I'm sure this will be a blog entry at some point down the road), don't pay attention to my watch. It wasn't until I made the final turn and could see the official clock that it hit me how close I actually was to my bold prediction. The clock had 19:xx on it and even though I knew it was going to be very close to actually keeping 19 on it, the race was already a huge success. I missed the 19's by 3 seconds to finish at 20:02, so so close!

My best 5K to date. Improving by 45 seconds, wasn't the 60 I really wanted, but I'm hardly going to beat myself up for getting that close. The results rocked, in fact, which happened to fit in perfect with my plans for later the night. CT's nephew was playing a concert that night and it made the end to a great day. Here's video from the show, not bad, not bad at all.