Breeze 1

Let the record reflect that today, August 28, 2014, at approximately 5:25 a.m., the first cool breeze of autumn was felt in Dallas.  Woot!!!

I had a track workout today (Yassos) and I almost bailed.  I'd had a dinner of wine, cheese and cake, and had gone to bed WAY too late for me.

And when I woke up, I felt like I had been dropped from about two feet in the air onto my left knee on concrete.  Yeah, it hurt, but it was a bruise kind of hurt, not any kind of twist.

I could make a huge list of highlights of running at a track (first and foremost is the ability to shed layers at will, which is only relevant in the winter), but among the highlights would be the ability to never be more than .125 miles away from where you started.  Well, that's not really true for me, since we have a 1.5 mile warm-up to get to the track (but with shortcuts, I could be back at my car in about .75 miles if necessary.  Anyway, one of the great things about the track is that when you're hurting, it's very easy to end the workout when your body dictates, instead of having to trek x miles to get back to your car. 

Another great thing about the track is that even when you're running a pace 10 minutes per mile slower than your buddies, you're still not alone. 

That (and the facts that this is our first track session of the season, and that my marathon is going to be here in not many more weeks) made me decide to get out of bed and give it a shot.

I figured I'd get the 1.5 mile warm-up, and assuming I felt okay, take a crack at the workout. 

Such a good decision! 

First, I got to feel that very first cool breeze.  There were about 3 others in the course of the next 1.5 hours. 

Second, within a tenth of a mile, my knee (and shoulder) felt fine.

Unfortunately, I can't say the same about my little finger.  It was throbbing, shooting pain for most of the cool-down.  One of the bonuses to doing marathon training for what would generally be considered "fast" times (obviously, that is very, very relative, Meb would probably laugh inside) is that I think you run with a lot of people who are very driven.  And I think some professions requiring a lot of education attract very driven people.  And so that means, I run with multiple doctors.  So I had one of them look at my finger after the run and told him what the issue was.  He said it's not infected, and it's definitely not MRSA, and that I could ice it if I wanted, but that it was probably going to stay painful when the blood was really pumping for another week or so.  I told him it hurt enough that I didn't think I could handle a week of that, and I asked if I should just have it amputated.  He kindly offered to do it then and there with a plastic knife he had in his car, and another buddy offered to film the "field operation."  But it was getting late, and we both had to get to work, so I've kept my painful finger for another day. 

Anyway, third, when I got to the track, I managed to do the whole workout! 

My pacing was off a bit.  I tried to run them all based on effort, without looking at my watch much, and because I had forgotten to flip a setting on my watch, that worked pretty well since it was pretty tough to figure out my pace if I did look at my watch. 

So I ended up:
2 seconds slow
2 seconds fast
7 seconds fast
8 seconds fast
5 seconds fast

I should mention that these were made at least marginally more difficult because we were doing passive rest in between.  You don't really get a lot of lactic acid building up with just 5 Yassos, but every little bit counts. 

The last one was insanely tough, but I was happy.  And I think that if I'd smoothed out my pacing a bit more, I probably could have done another one. 

All in all, totally awesome morning considering there was a chance I was going to skip the workout entirely (though yeah, more sleep would have been lovely, but that's what the long weekend is for!).  Happy day! 

So despite the rough start yesterday, the year is looking good!