Tour de Bayou (Practice) 3

AM
6.15M, 56:59, 9:15 pace, Max HR = 126, Avg HR = 113

PM
1.76M Warm Up for Tour de Bayou 3
Tour de Bayou 3, 4.31M, 29:03, 6:43 pace, Max HR = 168, Avg HR = 154, 64% Z4, 33% Z3
4.25M Warm Down for Tour de Bayou 3

The morning run was slow on purpose to recover from a string of high mileage days and to save my energy for the race later that day.

The race went well. I saw Joe at the starting line (he won stage 2), and he told me he'd be taking it easy today because of his upcoming Marine Corps Marathon this weekend. I already had my plans to take it easy because I'm tired, and because of a certain incident at work on Monday.

The fire alarm went off, disabling the elevators and trapping me 58 flights above a lunch date with my wife. I took the stairs down. It was easy while I was doing it, but I felt it in the quads all day today. They were screaming during the warm up but managed to be replaced by a general feeling of weakness by the time the race started.

Even so, I ran a good race. I came in fourth overall, behind a man and his two (high school aged?) sons. The family kicked my butt, but I'm still pretty happy with my work today. The out-and-back course was somewhat hilly, but the overall elevation gain on the out was only about 15 feet. So this gives me the opportunity to compare my out split with my back split.

Out:
2.16M in 14:44 (6:49 pace)

Back:
2.15M in 14:14 (6:37 pace)

So I managed to pick up the pace in the second lap. I'm not sure if I'm happy or upset that I kept my heart rate out of zone five. I didn't enter the race wanting to hurt -- I'm trying to save my legs. But to give less than a zone five effort on a race is disappointing. I just need to remember this isn't the goal race -- just a speed workout for the goal race.

Notes:
1) Jon Warren's group was doing their workout along our course, so it was nice to hear their cheers. Thanks to Jeff, Shon and Matt for the encouragement. At one point I merged with Katherine as she did her speed work, and running with her helped me to pick up my pace. Otherwise I ran pretty much by myself after the first mile. Thanks to Katherine for her post-race encouragement as well.
2) This is the longest Tour de Bayou race I've ever run.
3) The course that most closely corresponds to the second TDB race I did in the Spring. My pace was the same, although today I ran an extra .8M and my heart rate was significantly lower. I guess that qualifies as improvement. This is the blog entry from that race.
4) The post-run warm-down was a beating. I ran out of energy (similar to my PM run on this blog entry). I get to a point that I feel like I desperately need food and can't run another step. I'm a little lightheaded as well. My kingdom for a Gatorade! I mustered myself and trotted back to the car, but I absolutely have to do a better job of taking some calories before workouts. We shall see how this breakdown affects tomorrow's planned 6M morning run, and PM PIM session.
5) I ran most of the final 2/3 of the run with a feeling that there was a stick or rock in my right shoe. Mid-way through the warm down I finally decided to investigate it, and discovered a bloody sock thanks to an untrimmed toe nail. I hope I learn my lesson -- you can do all the preparation in the world for a marathon, but if you forget the simple detail of cutting your toe nails before the race then your goal can be sacrificed. I added a "clip toenails" reminder to my outlook calendar set for 24 hours before the marathon.

And if you're wondering why I'm sharing all of these gory details, you should know that I'm wondering why you're reading them!