I'll start out with the bad news. Apparently chemicals in the bottle I drink water from put me at risk for cancer. I'm downing fluids from that very bottle as I type, and if you know me at all you'd know that this doesn't worry me too much. Interstate 95 runs through my backyard and I'm sure there are plenty more cancer causing agents in the air I breath while I sleep. You know there are more bacterial cells in our body than there are total human cells? I have faith that one of these microbugs will ward off the carcinogens I ingest daily.
This bad news essentially qualifies as good news in the sense that it's the worst thing about this day so far. I can't complain.
Last night around midnight I was finishing up a game of spades and a box of wine (yes, that's right, it was box wine, and no, I didn't drink it alone) and if you'd asked me about what my goals were for this morning's Run for Clean Air I would have shrugged and maybe mentioned something about running under 20 minutes. When I ran into John at the starting line I expressed the same sort of attitude. Put simply, my only real goal was to enjoy the weather. After all, soon the skies will turn grey and and we'll be slogging through 90 degree 99% humidity days, reminiscing about the good ol' days back in April. I knew from a workout I did a couple weeks back that I had a chance to run in the low 19's, but I chose not to focus on this today.
The announcer jumped the gun so to speak on the start, and it caught me off guard. I stuck behind John for as long as I thought reasonable, and then tucked in with some folks closer to my abilities. This course is flat, slightly downhill at the start, and comes to an abrupt turn around at the halfway point. Mile one, 5:48. I knew I was speeding a little bit but I wanted to test the waters. Lost a little bit of momentum at the turn around. Around the two mile mark (6:14) the lamb kebabs from last night started yelling at me. Made me slightly uncomfortable, but it passed (no, not literally). During the last mile I passed a few guys who seemed to be struggling, and I still had no idea about a finish time. Didn't feel like thinking about it. I picked it up a bit when the finish came into sight. I caught a glimpse of the ticker and it read 18:4x:xx and I knew I had a chance to finish under 19. I let it rip. The last stretch was hard, and I crossed the line in 18:56.
I'm trying not to read too much from this. I have to say though that I feel really good about this time, and I'm really relieved that the work I've been doing over the last few months is showing results. And it's ironic that this happened in a race that I didn't really think too much about. After the race I stuck around long enough to watch John pick up an age group award. Congrats to him, as he came pretty close to PRing. The few times I caught a glance at him during the race it looked like he was out for a jog in the park. The rest of the morning was spent lazing in the grass, cooling off on a very nice walk with MM, and ingesting my race's worth of ice cream. Bike rides there and back were lovely. By the way, I've returned to riding my city beater, which is a fixed gear. Going well so far. I warmed up a bit beforehand and for the day I'll conservatively call it 4 miles in some time.
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