Week of March 26-April 1: 41 miles in 5 runs
  Monday: 8 miles pushing a stroller at 8:02/mi.
  Tuesday: Off
  Wednesday: 7 miles at 7:40/mi.
  Thursday: 8 miles on a treadmill at 7:30/mi.
  Friday: 6 miles pushing a stroller at 7:59/mi.
  Saturday: Off
  Sunday: Cherry Blossom 10-mile race

Most of this week was a continuation of last week's allergic misery. I finally went to the doctor on Tuesday and got some prescriptions, including codeine cough syrup. But they did not immediately help, and the codeine never helped. Drugs or no drugs, when I ran outside this week, I stayed up coughing most of that night. When I did not run outside, I slept better. So I resigned myself to running inside on a treadmill when possible while allergy season lasts, or at least until I find a Galen Rupp-style mask that I can wear running. I certainly didn't expect to run well in the Cherry Blossom 10-miler on Sunday after two bad weeks with little sleep, a lot of work, and not much running, all of which was easy running. But in fact I ran very well, and in hindsight I see that allergies effectively forced me into a two week taper. My time of 1:04:42 is 7 minutes faster than my previous 10-mile PR, which was so bad relative to my times at other distances that I didn't even list it among my PR's. Now my half and marathon times are the outliers, though I'm confident that today I could have kept going another 5k for roughly a 1:25 flat half-marathon, which would be almost 8 minutes faster than my best actual half. Speculation aside, my splits today were almost perfectly even: my average pace was 6:28, and I ran each mile between 6:24 and 6:29. I went through 5k in just over 20 minutes and 10k in 40:09, which makes that the second fastest 10k I've run, but I didn't slow down over the next 4 miles. My split at 5 miles was 32:18, which means I ran the second 5 miles only 6 seconds slower in 32:24. Somehow I managed to run hard but "within myself," as people say, the whole time. That, even more than my time, made this probably my best race to date. McMillan puts only my best 5k time ahead of this. But 5k's are not as complicated as longer races, and in the past I have never been able to run times in longer races that McMillan says correspond to my best 5k times. Since one of my main longer term running goals is to get the marathon right, I'm pleased finally to have come very close to doing that at 10 miles. Of course, 26.2 miles is a lot further, but this gives me some confidence that my goal of running a sub-3 hour marathon this Fall isn't totally crazy. But these allergies need to give me a break so that I can get back to real training now. I want to run some faster times at shorter distances in the next 2-3 months before switching my focus to the marathon.

Another thing that made this race memorable was that I saw Joan Benoit Samuelson just after the finish line. She beat me by around 2 minutes, fittingly. But it was inspiring to finish shortly after the first gold medalist in the women's marathon (in 1984).