Don't wanna be FAT!

After posting on Thursday, the pain above my left ankle worsened. By the end of the day Thursday I was limping just walking around. So I decided to give it a rest from Friday to Sunday. It is feeling just fine now and both legs felt like they were back to normal this morning.  Today's run was good.  AP:  7:12.  

3.75 mile warm-up, 4x100 strides, 12x400m w/ 60 seconds walking recovery, 3.75 mile cool-down. 400 meter splits were: 71:45, 69:56, 71:31, 71:24, 71:30, 71:45, 70:42, 71:61, 69:57, 70:96, 70:03, 67:06 (on this last one I ran the same pace that I had been running all the others in until the last 100 meters then I kicked it in).  Plan was to do 10x400m in 72-73 pace, but it felt so easy running what I was running from the start that I kept it there and decided to do a couple more.  I was hoping it would feel easy because this was meant as a tune-up for Saturday.  My legs actually felt better after the run than they did before.  I'm excited to race on Saturday!

Started tapering for the Salt Lake 1/2 marathon today. Nice and easy run. Legs feel good. AP: 6:58.

Nice to sleep in a little longer this morning. Easy 7. AP: 7:08

Easy run.  Mixed in 4 strides.  Excited to race tomorrow morning. Not excited to wake up at 4:45 a.m.  

I've got mixed feelings about this race. On one hand I am very discouraged because going into the race given the elevation profile and where I thought my current fitness level was I thought for sure I would be able to at the very least go under 1:09.  But, on the other hand I know that the course was a little long and everyone I talked to said they thought the course was a lot harder than then they thought it was going to be.  I felt the same way.  I was very surprised at the difficulty of the course.  I was also thrilled to take 4th place given the level of competition.  Even if I had the race I was hoping to have I don't think I would have been able to place any higher than 4th the three that beat me were just better than me it's as plain and simple as that.  I went a little harder and faster than I probably should have gone on some of those downhill miles from miles 3-5.  It was nice to have company for the first 6 miles or so and then it got incredibly lonely for the rest of the race.  Here are my mile splits based off of the mile markers on the course:  5:19, 5:38, 4:56, 5:07, 4:21 (Not sure why this one was so far off I know I didn't drop a 4:21 mile on the 5th mile though.), 11:20 (next 2 miles, I missed the mile marker), 5:50, 5:28, 5:34, 5:15, 5:35, 5:23, :37 for the last .1.   Cooled down 4 miles with Ben, Mike, Scott, and Justin.  It was fun to see a lot of you bloggers at the race.  Many had great races!