Summary of the past two weeks:

April 8-14: 50 miles (100% easy pace)

Monday: 5 miles very slow (no watch)
Tuesday: 7 miles at 7:24/mi.
Wednesday: off
Thursday: 7 miles at 7:18/mi.
Friday: 14 miles at 7:18/mi.
Saturday: 6.3 miles at 7:19/mi.
Sunday: 10.7 miles at 7:15/mi.

April 15-21: 30 miles (79% easy and 21% 10k paces)

Monday: off
Tuesday: off
Wednesday: 8.4 miles at 7:12/mi.
Thursday: 8.3 at 7:16/mi.
Friday: 5.3 at 7:25/mi.
Saturday: off
Sunday: 1.8 easy, then 10k race in 37:23 (see below)

The goal of the first of these two weeks was to recover from the Cherry Blossom 10-miler while running a fair number of easy miles. I intended to do a track workout on the weekend in order to prepare for the Pike's Peek 10k. But the weather changed this week. It suddenly became very warm, and the pollen finally made an appearance. So I ran with my allergy mask for most of this first week. It was very unpleasant, and I just couldn't imagine doing a track workout either in the heat and humidity (which I still wasn't used to) or with that horrible mask on. So I just kept running easy. But after Sunday's run (4/14), my left hip started hurting. That's not the hip I had injured recently, but the other one! So I took two days off, and during that time I decided to stop wearing my mask in order to test whether it was really worth it. It has been a year since allergy symptoms kept me up all night for weeks on end, so I had forgotten just how bad it can be. I decided to take my chances with the pollen. Luckily, when I started running again on Wednesday 4/17 (now without my mask), although I had plenty of the usual allergy symptoms, I managed to avoid the severe allergic reaction that I had last year. The daily pollen count still may not have quite peaked yet, but I think that I'll survive if I've made it this far. The reason must be simply that I started taking Allegra in February so that it was well into my system before the pollen appeared, which I did not do last year. Once the allergic reaction gets going, it's too late. But I managed to head it off this year. Mind you, I'm sniffling and sneezing as much as anyone you know, but I'm not up coughing all night this year. That's a big difference. It has not correlated, however, with harder training. In addition to last weekend's hip scare, I'm really busy at work right now and don't expect to have much surplus energy to funnel into running for a few weeks. I'll be lucky to get in one 5k-specific workout before my next race in two weeks. But the end of this busy period is now on the horizon.