Hello there. It's been a while. Shamed by my friend Padraig, who writes a blog post almost every day, I've decided to stop procrastinating and write something.
I manage to recover from the calf tear and train a little bit before running a 10K race in Huntington Beach, California on Dec. 29th. It was a flat course along the beach road. I ran 47:26, however, even though I wasn't in very good shape it really did seem faster so I think the course was about 300m (1 minute) long. I actually felt quite good on the 5k back and was moving well. Won my (small) age group and was 18th out of 221, but of course lots of folks were just out there for the fun of it.
I was there because we were visiting our daughter in Los Angeles. Which means I ate way too much good food and gained weight that I'm struggling to lose. This despite my avowal to become a vegetarian, mostly successful, after having watched The Game Changers on Netflix. This is a very persuasive documentary about how good a plant-based diet is for athletes. If it works for top ultra runner Scott Jurek it should work for the rest of us, right? Seriously, I think it's a good lifestyle choice.
At any rate, I trained pretty well in January and am ramping up the distance with a goal of 90km a month by the end of March. In particular, I really need to get back to a long run (24-30k) once a week.
I've totally lost my speed, though, as evidenced by my slow times on the club wednesday night interval workouts. I'm hoping this is due to a combination of extra weight and not being in good shape, and the speed, what still remains of it, will return over the next two months.
However, the main reason I wanted to write this post was to share with you my primary goal for the year, which is...do not get injured! Can I go an entire year without an injury? Can any runner? I certainly hope so, and I'm certainly going to try. Just being very cautious all the time, and especially after races. Let's see if it's possible....
I hope my blogging and running friends in Australia are not and will not be badly affected by the fires - here's hoping for rainy days ahead!
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