Demons

It has been a week since our regional meet and I don't think the reality of no longer being part of a cross country team has sunk in, and I don't know that it will until early September 2007 when, although I my still be in a cross country race, I will not be a member of a team. So next August will be the first time in the in 12 years (over half my life) since I have not been a member of a cross country team.

Before getting into details about the regional meet I should probably talk a little about the weeks leading up to it. I developed (hopefully) tendonitis in my left foot. After talking it over with the trainers I decided to gut it out and continue training on it as I normally would and I basically got jacked up on some anti-inflamitories before the race. I was a little apprehensive about this as I cannot recall the last time I even took medicine for a cold and considered just not taking the pills but was very happy I did.

Going into the meet, as I had mentioned before we were ranked 10th in the region and that is where we finished, but as a team I would say we ran about as poorly as we had all year. I was I 2nd guy and the best I had finished all season was 4th. The two guys I would have expected to be 2nd and 3rd on the team were our 6 and 7. The reality is though, if they had run like they could the best we would have finished would have been 8th. The most surprising part of this whole thing was Augustana finishing in 5 and beating Duluth by about 15 points for the final bid to NC's. It was definately a combination of Augie running quite well and Dulth being a team that is only 5 deep and having their regular number 2 finish 5th on their team.

For me I don't think I could have run the race any smarter. I went through the mile in about 5:25, 3k in 10:04, 5k in 16:58 and finished off the negative split in 33:43. The course is pretty legit, there is nothing too difficult in the name of hills but you are never really on level ground. I think I cought 12 guys through the last k but three ended up getting me back for a net of 9. Five of us were all together for about through about 3 or 4k but when I started passing guy no one came with me. We had kind of decided this was the way we were going to have to run the race by running even splits and passing later in the race. Obviously things didn't work as well for us as we were hoping.

So Tuesday after the meet I went to see the Doc and he wanted an x-ray on the ol' foot. The x-rays were negative and that is what led him to think tendonitis. So I am taking two weeks off from running and will be taking the anti inflamitory during this time. If the foot is still bothering me, we are going to have a bone scan to see if it is a stress fracture. So hopefully in a week (give or take a few days) I will be running again. This track season I am really focusing on the 10,000m outdoors and will probably run a lot of miles, and a couple 3k's and maybe a 5k indoors. I think I can run right around that 32:00 mark for 10,000m if I can just catch the weather on the right day, so we will make my goal 31:59.9 and for 5,000m I would like to run somewhere in the neighborhood of 15:30... only time will tell

also, I am going to start writing in this thing at least once a week once I am running again with more details about mileage and workouts...