Thursday,  May 7th

Well, on Saturday morning I learned to my surprise  that my virtual 5K race was going to be held on Sunday. I thought it was May 13th not May 3rd. That led me to decide to take a rest day on Saturday.

The virtual 5K turned out to be a lot of fun. Kristen and Rob became very involved in my effort. Kristen had to teach me how to set up Zoom so that I could be in touch with the race online.  She also took pictures and posted them on Facebook and Instagram after the event.  I had decided,  after considering all of the routes that I run around Jackson, the easiest way to do this event was going to be to run 7 laps around my home block  which is about a half a mile. Rob agreed to be my pacer, he said for 2 miles, but it turned out that he ran the whole 5K with me.  I guess I was a little pumped up for this event because we started out at about 6:30 pace.   We settled down and ran the three miles in the following times, 8:07 – 8:57 – 9:32.   The final time 28:17 was better than I expected but not as good as I hoped.   I think I could have run somewhat faster if I had time to recover from what was probably the hardest workout I have done in a month and I didn’t run an unusually quick 6:30 placement first half mile.   All in all, I did enjoy the experience. When the results were posted it turns out that we ran the 10th best time out of 68 people who posted their performance and I was the oldest person in the race.

Monday rested during a pretty bad weather day.

Tuesday I ran 6 miles for the first time in quite a while on pretty heavy legs. It took me 72 minutes to do it with some stops for stretching.  It became more of a personal challenge as the run evolved.  I kept upping the goal as the run progressed.  Mile 5 was the hardest on the up hill section.  After that the 6 mile goal was unavoidable.

Wednesday was another rest day.

Today I went to the cinder track the first time in weeks.  I covered 4 miles of random run, jog, pick-up, walk, stretch  for 58 minutes.  It took a long time for the aches in my legs to abate. The heaviness in my thighs ever subsided.   I felt lucky to get a day of running before  the predicted  turn in weather . With two days of winter storms on the way, I will have to rely on a few indoor workouts over the weekend.

STATS are steady.