First Race of 2017- Forks XV

The first words always seem to be the hardest for me. It has been 3 months since I last wrote, and what it really comes down to is I haven’t made this a priority like I used to. It is currently 5:30am on a Saturday morning, and I figured- “enough procrastinating already just rip the bandaid off and write something! It can be short, long and it doesn’t have to be groundbreaking just get back in the habit.”

The point of this blog was to share my running and fitness journey with a little life now and then, so I thought the easiest way for me to get back into writing is to recap my first race of 2017.

To give a quick recap of my running over that last 3 months it has been ok. I am not where I had hoped I’d be, mainly because I was having some knee issues that lasted for 2 weeks at the end of the February. I haven’t had knee issues for over 5 years so I didn’t know what was causing it. I ended up starting to wear a knee brace, and changed the cross training I was doing,  thinking maybe that was irritating it. It’s better now, not 100% but it gets better everyday. I am also nearly 15% of my way to my goal of running 1000 miles this year, I have mapped out the remainder of the year and with a marathon scheduled for the fall I expect to be able to achieve this goal but anything can happen in the next 9 months.

Onto the topic of this post, I ran a 15K on Sunday, March 26th. It was the 2nd oldest race in my area (44th Anniversary) that a few hundred people completed. After running for the last 6 years this is my first time running this race because with it being at the end of March, and a longer distance I wasn’t always trained enough for it.  The fun fact is that my Dad also ran this race 4 times in the 80’s, so it was fun to add that to a list of races we have both done.

I arrived at the race about 45 minutes before the start, and picked up my bib. The pick up was in a school, which was nice because it was about 40 degrees out. I stayed inside and warmed up in the hallways, listening to music, trying to clear my mind and get in the right mindset. I was feeling pretty good. I headed back to my car with about 15 minutes to go until start to drop off my race tshirt and sweatshirt I was wearing and then arrived at the start line with 5 minutes to go. Just enough time to get this picture 🙂

This race was my first big test of my last 6 months of training and recovering from a hip flexor injury. Despite my Dad’s warning, I ended up going out too fast on the first mile (I let my ego get the best of me), but found a good rhythm from miles 2-6.

It was a rolling hills course, and I paced with a couple different people until about the halfway point when I ran mostly alone but had others in my eyesight. My legs started to feel a little fatigued around mile 6.5, and then the hardest part of this course was from mile 7.75-8.25, a big hill. At 7.75 it was up and around a corner, and I had hoped it was ‘the hill’ everyone had referenced, but when I got around the bend and saw another hill I had a few choice words! Thankfully that 8 mile hill wasn’t as bad as it looked, after I got over that it was was downhill and flat until the finish. Unfortunately I started my kick a little too early and the last .2 miles I was hurting!

I finished in 1:21:26 (8:41 pace), which I am happy with considering it was my first time running the course, and I didn’t pace as I should’ve, I didn’t remind myself to ‘run my own race’ as I usual do during the early miles. There is room for improvement for my next race in 5 weeks, a half marathon.

Thanks for reading, I’ll post again soon, I promise!

 

P.S. February 22nd marked my 2 year anniversary of having this blog!