Boston Marathon Week 5 of 18: Not the greatest of weeks...

The one advantage of evening long runs through Golden Gate Park:
Seeing the Conservatory of Flowers lit up for the Summer of Love

Not a great week for me, guys. I had a couple of solid workouts but that's pretty much all I can say. Things were going just fine until Tuesday morning when I was rear-ended on the way to work. I was driving in the far left lane at normal freeway speed when some dude slammed into me at what must have been 90-100mph without even trying to stop. My car skidded all over the road and I was just lucky I was able to keep it from slamming into the freeway divider or careening into the other lane & getting hit again.

The other dude pulled over on the other side of the freeway for about one minute, got out and looked at the front of his car, then just drove off. I took some pictures but they were pretty bad since he was so far away and I wasn't able to get a good shot of the license plate. I'm still waiting on the official call from the insurance company, but the guy at the auto body place where AAA towed it assured me that my 2005 Honda Civic was worth probably $4,000 and now had about $10,000 worth of damage, so.

On the plus side, I was somehow magically unharmed. No whiplash, no stiffness or soreness, nothing. And I have insurance, and we have a second car which rarely gets driven. So as these things go, it could have been much, MUCH worse and I am not exaggerating when I say that I spent most of the tow truck ride reflecting on how incredibly lucky I was and am.

On the other hand, I was a bit shaken up for the first few hours. I'd texted my boss that I probably wouldn't be in for a while and she was like, "OMG please go straight home now & take a sick day," and ultimately I was glad I did. No, my car was not worth a lot and I don't need to urgently buy another one, but at the same time, it was a pretty emotional event and focusing on work would have been super hard.

I don't know if it's related (I suspect not) but later in the week I had some lower back & hip issues that made a couple of runs impossible, so I came up 12 big ones short this week. :-/

~*~*~ Boston Marathon: Week 5 of 18 ~*~*~
Grand Total: 36.2 miles

* 10 easy
* 4 speed
* 6.2 MP
* 16 long

Monday 1/8: Karate.

Tuesday 1/9: 4 miles warm up, 8 x 600m @ 6:55 pace / 200m jog, 2 miles cool down = 10 total. I paced these pretty terribly. The pace was actually not that hard but they did get harder (which I guess is the point). Not awful but I think they were a little faster than intended, just because I'm out of practice at pacing short intervals and always worried about going too slow. Splits were 2:23-2:32.5 (6:29-6:46 pace).

Wednesday 1/10: Karate. The bad news: I don't know if it was related to the accident, but on Wednesday while tying my shoe before karate I suffered an excruciating lower back spasm & could barely walk for a while. By karate I was okay to do some stuff, but still in enough pain that sleeping was difficult.

Thursday 1/11: 6 easy Rest. My back felt better, but far from 100%. I tried a few experimental strides in the house and it was still pretty painful, so I decided not to try to run. LOOK AT ME LEARNING YOU GUYS.

Friday 1/12: 2.3 warm up, 50:00 @ marathon pace, 1.7 cool down = 10.2 total

Back not 100% but my warm up felt fine so I decided to go ahead with the workout. When I first started distance running, it took me a while to learn that race day magic (read: adrenaline and fresh legs) is a thing, and even when your goals are reasonable, it's completely normal for race pace workouts to feel super crappy and cause you to ask yourself "How will I ever hold this pace for xx miles??" And lo, race day comes and it's somehow way, way easier than in workouts.

So, I'm used to marathon pace workouts of 6-10 miles feeling really hard. Lately, though, they seem easier? Not *easy*, but like, "This is kind of okay." And I'm not really used to that. So....cool??



(Full disclosure: These splits were all a touch faster than I what I *really* consider my marathon pace--closer to right at 8:00--but I was running on hills, and trying to figure out how to pace them correctly, but also freaking out about not hitting the pace, so I was probably running uphills faster and banking time on downhills more aggressively than I would in an actual marathon. I would actually consider it progress if I could run a MP workout on this same route just a *touch* slower.)

Saturday 1/13: 6 easy Rest. Again, I don't know if it was related to the accident or to my back issue on Wednesday/Thursday (doubt it), but I had some serious pain in my left hip in the iliacus (?) area, bad enough that even just jogging a few easy steps was at least a 5 or 6 on the pain scale, so trying to run even a few easy miles seemed like a bad idea. Womp womp.

Sunday 1/14: 16 long. Hip not 100% better after a rest day, but more in the 1-3 levels of discomfort (ranging from "Is that a thing there? Hard to tell" to "Well, I can kind of feel a thing I wish wasn't there"). My (pretty much chronic) right knee issues also decided to show up to the party with 3-4 miles left to go. The run itself felt weirdly fast and easy given my effort level, but my hip was clearly not not NOT happy afterward. I kind of think maybe a month+ of no strength work may finally be catching up with me, so here's hoping that some squatting and lunging and various core work will sort things. :-/

THIS WEEK CAN'T BE WORSE, RIGHT???

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Boston Marathon Week 1 of 18: On your mark, Get set...

Boston Marathon Week 2 of 18: speed, snow, & vertical

Boston Marathon Week 3 of 18: Foiled By Weather & Travel

Boston Marathon Week 4 of 18: There's "hills" and then there's HILLLZZ