Turkey Day Race Plans

I'm planning to run another 5K on Thanksgiving, which is less than 4 weeks away. Considering how hilly Saturday's race was, and considering that I managed to improve my time anyway, AND considering that the Turkey Day race will be a lot flatter, I can't help but want to improve my time even more.

I'm addicted. I know. I will stop soon.

I've come up with a training schedule adapted from Hal Higdon's intermediate 5K training plan. This week's schedule looks like this:

Monday: 3 miles
Tuesday: 6 x 400
Wednesday: 3 miles
Thursday: Rest
Friday: 4 miles fast
Saturday: Rest
Sunday: 6 miles

Running is a good distraction.

Things that knock the wind out of you

(Fall leaves during a post-race hike that I took yesterday)

My last post was so positive and self-reflective and optimistic. Funny how things work. The next day I got a call from my dad saying that my mom had been admitted to the hospital for severe abdominal pain. They did a CT scan and a colonoscopy and discovered that she has a tumor in her descending colon. She also had an associated infection. She's going to have surgery on Monday (a resection, which is where they cut out the tumor and surrounding colon tissue and splice the healthy tissue back together), at which point they'll send the tumor to pathology for further investigation.

It's frustrating to not know exactly what is going on - what the official diagnosis is, what post-surgery treatment will entail, what the prognosis is, etc. It's also frustrating to be so far away and not be able to talk to the doctors myself. I have a ton of questions.

I talked to my mom yesterday and she was in pretty good spirits - especially considering that she is on an all-liquid diet right now. That would drive me absolutely crazy (and make me hangry), but she's handling it fairly well. She has a roommate, which is good because she's very sociable. Better to have her sitting there gabbing with a new friend than being in there all alone.

I feel almost like I did the time that I climbed a tree in my friend's backyard, fell out, and slammed stomach-down onto the pavement below. I'm... overwhelmed. Discombobulated. Scared. Worried. Emotionally, I've been doing well over the past month, but now I'm starting to feel the pull of that familiar black hole of depression and anxiety. That scares me, too. I find myself feeling completely overwhelmed by school, and I have this urge to just not go, to just stay in bed.

*     *
In better news, I ran another 5K yesterday morning. It was foggy and freezing cold - literally. I could not feel my toes for the first two miles. I also discovered that the course consists entirely of hills; there was only one brief flat stretch. I thought I was running pretty slowly. But somehow I managed to cut a whole minute off my previous time. I think I came in somewhere around 28:10. Of course, now I'm thinking that wow, I'm so close to being in the 27-minute range... How hard would it be to cut another few seconds off, especially if it's a flat course?

40 minutes

Another busy day... I was up at 5:45, out the door an hour later, and didn't stop until right about now. My Ph.D. life is a whirlwind of papers and presentations and research and labwork and meetings and teaching... Somehow it all gets done, and when I stop to look up, two or three months have gone by. Part of me is a little sad that I'm already 1 1/2 years into my program. It is stressful and crazy, but secretly, I love being a grad student and would do this forever if I could.

Last night I ran for 40 minutes straight on the treadmill. Had it not been late, I would have run longer. It was one of those times when I felt like I could have gone on for miles and miles and miles without getting tired. It was nice to be able to do that the day after the 5K. Surprisingly, my legs didn't feel sore. I'm starting to think that as a recreational runner, I have untapped potential. Right now I am not putting THAT much effort into it. Mostly I do it for fun. If I added some speedwork, set some clear goals, who knows - maybe I could run a 5K in 25 minutes or less. That would be amazing for me.

Unfortunately, I did come down with the cold that's been going around our house. I didn't run today and probably won't tomorrow, either. Working out while sick never seems to help me out much in the way of recovery (though I have heard it's the opposite for some people).

Successful 5K

The 5K was a success. I managed to run it in 29:10, which - given that I usually jog on a treadmill at a pace of ~11 minutes/mile - I'm proud of. From the moment the gun went off, I tried to push myself. I identified people who seemed to be holding steady and stayed near them. Every few minutes I'd pick someone who was just a bit faster and follow them.

The course was fairly flat, and most of the inclines were downhill. It was kind of hot for mid-October, though. By the middle of the race, the sun was blazing down and temperatures were ramping into the 70s. I'd much prefer running in cool, cloudy, 40-60 degree weather.

By the last 0.2-0.3 miles, I was pretty worn out and had that worrying "It's possible that I could throw up any second" feeling... But I focused on breathing and tried to maintain my speed. As soon as I saw the finish line, I broke into a sprint. I like sprinting at the end. It makes me feel like I've truly given the race my all.

My immediate thought upon finishing was, Head towards the bathroom in case breakfast comes back up. Puking four feet from the finish line in front of dozens of people seemed like a non-option. But my queasy stomach settled quickly, and I walked over to the tents to check my time and grab a post-race banana.

I'm already planning the next 5K. There's a big one about a month from now that looks like a lot of fun. In preparation, I think I'll work on ramping up my base speed. I'm also going to do some casual speedwork once a week. I'd love to break 29 minutes in the next race.