Day 1- Race Week

It’s race week for us. And by us, I mean me. Julie will be ‘ineligible’ for this race. So I’m preparing for our ‘Daytona 500’. Obviously this is just another 5K but it is the first race of the year for ‘us’. And, instead of car door handles, I have love handles. I also doubt we will make Sportscenter. But it’s very exciting to be running the first race of the year. This week I am going to take you through my ‘preparations’ up to the race. Again, it’s only a 3.1 mile race and we have been running that distance daily on our runs, so there really isn’t much prep to be done.



We love having races on our schedule because it gives us something to train for. It isn’t running just to run. I have set 2 goals for myself on this race. The first goal is to beat our time from last year, which was our first race ever. My second goal is to run it under 30 minutes. If I achieve the second goal, I will have achieved both goals.


Monday-

We woke up this morning at 5:30. Julie didn’t want to go, and thusly it convinced me that I didn’t want to go, but alas we went after realizing that it would only suck for a little bit until we were fully awake. I did some minor stretching before we went out the door, and that seemed to wake me up a bit. Because Julie has to run a little slower, I spent the first ¼ mile running with her as my warm-up. Once we hit the trail, I peeled off. I usually listen to something with some beat to it to keep me motivated (between pop and rock) but this morning I decided to go with classical. This is a whole other blog post, but it really helped me relax and focus on my run. I probably ran at a 10 minute/mile pace this morning. I can’t figure out if my heart rate monitor has a stopwatch or not, so I am not for sure how fast I was going. I usually hit a couple of walls when I am running at a faster rate, but this morning I only hit one wall with about ½ mile left. I slowed a bit but picked my pace back up once my heart rate came down. Even though it was chilly when we started, I was dripping with sweat when it was over. It felt great. Tomorrow we plan on running again first thing in the morning.