Hurt, Recovered, Raced

So I meant to post sooner but time got away from me. Even though its summer, school is ramping up again as I’ve got a couple of different research projects I’ve started working on. This means less time for blogging for sure, but so far, it hasn’t cut down on my running time.

After a couple of weeks of consistent running, and even a 33 mile week, I had a setback about 2 weeks ago now. I got up early to run last Monday morning and headed out on my usual Red Hook loop. About 10 minutes in, I fell flat on my face, hitting my left knee and right hand pretty hard as well as scraping up quite a bit of my right side. Not an ideal way to start the week. As I hobbled back home with blood streaming down my leg/arm, I tried not to get too freaked out and just assess the damage. It wasn’t good. My knee was pretty swollen by the time I got home. So I took the day off work (I stand at my desk most of the day) and sulked and iced the day away.

I was planning to race the Mini 10K that next weekend and wasn’t sure what this would do to those plans. My knee was sore for a few days so I took Motrin and didn’t run for a few days. Since the race was on Saturday, on Friday I took myself out for a test run to see where things stood. My legs felt like crap from the time off and my knee was a little slow to get warmed up, but by the end of the easy half hour of running with W, it felt loosened up and I decided that I’d give the Mini a try the next day.

I’m glad I did. Going into it, my realistic goal was to run faster than my last Mini in 2009 where I ran 43:56. My more aggressive goal was to go sub 7 minute pace for the 10K. So here’s how my splits ended up:
7:15
7:01
7:02
7:12
6:47
6:52
1:24
Final time by my watch was 43:35 – The official results had me a few seconds faster at 43:32. The start was crowded, I had a blue big (gotta love all women’s races!) but I couldn’t get into the packed corral by the time I arrived about 10 minutes before start time. So by the time I got in and across the line, lots of women with seed times slower than mine had also made it across and there was a lot of trying to get into my pace without weaving in and out of the crowds that first mile. The crowding may be good though since it forced me to go out conservatively and I ended up negative splitting.

I did have a racing first for me (which doesn’t happen very often – this makes me sound old, but I think I’m right around 20 years of racing…). I puked at the finish line. Sorry to anyone who was nearby. I’ve felt like I needed to puke before, mostly after races where I really push it the last 100m or so to get to the finish, but this time it actually happened. I raced a woman to the finish (I won) from about 200m out and I guess that’s what it takes. I wonder if having a baby makes me more prone to puking. Guess I’ll have to race more to find out…

My knee felt OK although it was a little sore the next day. I’ve noticed it on steep downhills recently but that’s it, so I’m calling it mostly recovered and not altering my running plans because of it. Goal for this week is to make it to at least one group run and get in 4 running days. One week at a time…