Update on the past month (April 21-May 22)

For the past month I've been very busy and running hasn't been among my priorities. One of the major turning points on the academic calendar that governs my life is graduation, which was this past Saturday, May 18. Prior to that, as far as running goes, I pretty much kept things easy when I managed to run at all, with very few exceptions. But I did manage to keep my weekly mileage at a tolerable level to begin marathon training off of in early summer. My mileage for the past four weeks has been 46, 51, 50, and 50. My longest run was 15 miles (at 7:12/mi. pace), but that was way back on April 26. Most runs besides that were either 6-8 mile easy runs or 11-ish mile medium-long runs, except for a 5-mile tempo around 6:30 pace on April 29, a 5k race (Public Service 5k) on May 5, and a 10k race (Capitol Hill Classic) on May 19. The 5k race was a weird experience: I won in a very windy 18:39, easily beating the 2nd place finisher who had finished ahead of me two weeks earlier at the Pike's Peak 10k, even though my pace was the same in both races. I would have preferred my first race victory to come with a faster time, but the wind was very strong and the competition very weak. I ran the 10k two weeks later at somewhere between race and tempo effort, finishing in 39:30. I should have run at a tempo effort from the beginning, since I'm in no shape to race a 10k. But at the start line I recognized Tera Moody, one of the top female marathoners in the US, lining up right in front of me. Inspired by the presence of such an athlete (according to a race report, she was in town for a sibling's graduation), I ran a bit faster than I intended in the first half but eventually slowed down instead of putting in the hard effort required to maintain that pace over the second 5k. It's already getting rather humid now in DC, so I appreciate not having to recover from a truly hard effort when running in this weather at all is difficult enough. This coming weekend, however, is forecasted to be cooler, and I am registered for a half marathon. I may be up to beating my soft PR at that distance, though my focus right now is not racing but getting serious again about training for races in the Fall, which I now have some time and energy to begin doing.