What a Ride

This has been a wild ride.  The past month has been beyond stressful from an athletic point of view.  After we got back from our annual cross country camp I developed an illness that would lead to pneumonia so after 10 days completely off of running and only 2 weeks away from the Fox Cities 1/2 Marathon.  I got a few good days of solid workouts and tempo runs, but I would get sick again just 6 days from race day.  I managed to shake it with about a day to spare, but as I am sure you could imagine, I was nervous, was I ready to run fast, could I break 1:20, would I stay within 1:30, hell at one point I wondered if I would finish or run it at all.  Friday I tuned all that garbage out and just threw out all of my excuses and by race day I fell right back into race mode and attacking every mile with surgical precision. I felt the start was conservative for my normal style but for the best as I was cooked at the finish.  My first 5k was solid,  second did lend itself to me working on that for next year.  Fueling at mile 7 went smoothly.  And my last surge to the finish left me with no kick but probably would have been able to go if needed.  All in all this ended up being a great race on a stellar course  and despite all of the obstacles I was able to improve my time by over 5 minutes to  just under 1:20 according to the gps.  12th overall out of over 2700 runners. 2nd out of 167 in my age group.

I have a couple more lined up to finish out the year here in tomahawk, Stevens point, and possibly Wausau or Milwaukee .