Fresh Start

Last week was a decent week for me as I topped the week of at 85 miles. I was going to do a half marathon on Saturday as my final good bye to my spring peak, but I've slowly come to realize that the peak was gone and continuing to race was really doing nothing for me, except delaying the beginning of my summer base-building. With that in mind, I bailed on the race. I did a 20 miler on Saturday instead and it went pretty good. Dave and I coasted through the 20 at an average pace of 6:41. I was fighting some back problems over the last few miles, but hopefully that was just a fluke thing and not a sign of bad things to come.

Yesterday consisted of a nice quick 14 miler. I tried to run at a fast but comfortable pace without looking at the garmin except at the halfway point and at the finish. I was surprised to see the pace at 6:30 at the 7 mile turnaround and by the time I finished it had crept down to 6:24. While I was tired at the end, the effort level was still very manageable.

However today I guess I paid the price for that. I had two very easy recovery runs on tap, which was a good thing, because I needed. The legs just had absolutely no snap in them today. My morning run of 9 miles was a drag the entire time and I kept it slow with the pace coming in at 7:15. The afternoon I felt a little better, but still kept things slow, but I didn't have a watch, so I can't say exactly how slow.

Overall, I'm pretty excited with how I feel right now. From a fitness standpoint, I feel like I should really be able to put in some good training this summer as I'm already coming into a little ahead of where I was at over previous summers. The only thing that is sort of worrying me is the continuing pain I feel in my hip/butt/back area. When I look at the symptoms, it seems to be sciatica related, which would be nice. If it's just pain, I can deal with that. I just don't want it to be anything else. For now, I'll just continue to monitor and hope it goes away. It would make it a lot easier on all of us if it did.