I love a good series of races.  Especially running races, over the same course.  Such a good way to gauge your improvement.  Or decline, as it may be.  Last week saw the third in the series of 10km running races I have been racing in.  The first one went reasonably well, the second one slightly worse but I was injured, and then this was the third.  Alas, it was worse again.

After the last race I spent a fair bit of time icing and nursing my strained achillies tendon.  It actually improved quite quickly after the run, to be better than it felt before the run within about two days.  It did still hurt though, so I was still babying it a lot.  And of course it was also the darkest time of year, mixed in with Christmas and New Year and all of the celebration and lack of movement that goes along with that.  The long and the short of it is that although I was looking after the achillies everything else was just slowly getting tighter and tighter.  In fact, it was getting to the point where getting out of bed in the morning I would have to spend a minute or two flexing and bending my knee just to get it to feel OK.

Race day dawned, and I was still more in christmas party mode than race mode, but went along anyway, with my racing buddies Anne Marie and Gwen providing motivation.  After getting to the start line with plenty of time I realised that it was absolutely freezing standing there waiting.  I knew there was a reason I traditionally arrive on the gun.  Anyway, we jumped up and down to try and warm up a bit, then the gun went and off we headed.  As I said, the achillies was still a bit tender, and so I was trying to be reasonably nice to it, but still managed to get through the first two km at a reasonable clip.  Unfortunately I missed the marker to press the lap button for the first km, but I am fairly confident (and my polar data backs this up) that the first one was a little under 4:30 and then the next one was closer to 4:20.  Things were looking good, and I thought I was being OK to the achillies, so happy times.  Unfortunately it soon took a turn for the worse.

As my lack of sleep over the proceeding weeks was starting to show in how I felt I also started noticing my knee.  Now really it was stupid to be racing with it feeling like that ahead of time, but I had hoped it would survive.  By km 4 I could definately feel it though, and in the fifth km it classified as pain.  I thought about stopping, but didn't relish the idea of walking all the way home (now 5km in either direction) in the cold, so I figured I would just keep going.  It sort of worked, in that it got me home, but the time was my slowest yet (45:46.9) and my knee was in agony afterwards.

The first bright light of the day was that Anne Marie smashed her previous efforts by a huge margin, and I was able to enjoy some of her high vicariously, to take the edge off my personal feelings.  The second is that I had some moments of clarity during the run, where I began to see a few priorities and think about a few goals and desires.  I am still holding out hope that race 4 can be an improvement on the last three, but only time will tell.  In the mean time I am working first on getting everything working properly again, and from there I will move on and aim for some bigger and better things!  Subscribe to the page (there is an RSS feed button somewhere...) to hear about them as they firm up.

Lap times below, with the first lap being 2km.

Lap    Lap Time   
  
2.      0:08:51.2   
3.      0:04:27.7     
4.      0:04:30.4     
5.      0:04:41.8     
6.      0:04:45.9     
7.      0:04:37.3      
8.      0:04:43.3     
9.      0:04:35.3     
10.    0:04:34.0    
  
Cheers,
Rowan