Ok, so I will never be good enough to finish ‘in the money’ of any race, but I found the next best thing. Today I officially became the assistant cross country coach at Jackson Community College. I see this as an oppurtunity to mesh two things I love to do, run and teach. I am glad to be working with a great head coach, Brian Olsen, who has years of experience and is a nice guy to boot.

What a cool gig!

1:25:55 (6:34/mi pace)
7th place (out of 103) overall 2nd in age group (out of 5)
Official Results  

I have never run a more hilly course in my entire life. Up, down, up, down, up, down. There were two big ones within the first 5 miles, but I took those with little difficulty, driving my arms and shortening my stride. More and more hills after that made it such that the relatively small hill at mile marker 10.5 kicked my butt. I felt like I was walking.

My first mile was 6:15 pace as was miles 2 and 3. I slowed down to a 6:20 by mile 7 but I felt good. I thought (at the time) I could make it the whole way at that pace. Mile 9 started getting me bad, and I started to slow, which was distressing. I wanted to break 1:25 (failed) but I mananged to beat my time from the Martian half marathon I ran back in April. Considering this race was so hilly and the humidity was 90% (and apperently a little ‘long’, we started at the wrong sign I guess) so I will be happy in the result.

There was a local band made up of teanagers that would play parts of motivation songs as runners came accross the finish line (we were spaced out quite a bit) Well, they were playing ‘Run like Hell’ by Pink Floyd as I came accross. That is significant because my .mp3 player was just finishing the orginal version of the same song about 100 m before the finish line. Kindof cool, actually.

The new head cross country coach Brian Olsen at JCC started out behind me. He told me he was treating this as a training run for the Detroit marathon. He passed me ~5.5 miles in and ended up beating me by about 1.5 minutes. Now he will brag to the team. Oh well. _I_ have only been running for about a year now. _HE_ has been running for 30 years.

Once again, just like at the Martian half, I ate too much food afterwards and my gut feels crappy. The food was really good, and I was hungry. I just need to remember to slow down. I had my 1 car-boom pack at mile 7.5 and I think it helped. I was stupid to open it just as I came upon a hill, though. My legs feel great and have 2 small blisters on my toes. Everything else feels good. I might even go out and do a run tommorow.

46:02 (6:08/mi pace)
18th overall (out of 191) 
1st in age (out of 11)

A pretty nice day for a run, although the humidity was a little high. My starting pace didn’t seem that fast, but my first two miles were faster than 5:50. My 3 mile split was less than 18 flat which means I would have set a PR for a 5K time if I was running the 5K race. Some races in the Citizen Patriot Run Series draw quite the running crowd and this was no different. It was a crowded field that even had some Kenyans running in it.

My shins were giving me a little grief this week, but good stretching and some aspirin 2 hours before the run helped, I’m sure.

I did sortof taper for this race, chosing to go easy this week, but I also am training for my 1/2 marathon in a few weeks and my full marathon in late October. Within 45 minutes of the end of the race, I was at the Jackson County Relay for Life and ran for another 14 or so miles (a little over 1.5 hours) for the JCC Phi Theta Kappa team. I ended up getting my 20+ mile run for the week, broken up, yes, but I did not have much choice there.