Season Opener

Hello, all! We had our first race today way on up in the Green Mountains, so sorry this is a little late. It was a good week for me- I'm settling into a regular schedule with classes, I've got a good handle on schoolwork, and my roommates and I have hotly debated everything from North vs. South (Ken is a Tennessee native) to Ramen or Cup of Noodles (jury still out on that one).

Monday- AM- 9 easy, 63 min, up the Charles to Fresh Pond and back- same 9.xx something loop as a couple weeks ago. Core/strength afterward- I'm starting to become less pathetically weak! PM- 3mi shakeout with James and Jason barefoot on Nickerson, 22min.

Tuesday- AM- 3 easy, 22:30, solo shakeout. PM- 10 easy, 65min, plus strides and drills.

Wednesday- PM- Light workout at the Brookline Res- 3 up, strides, 7x2min on, 2min off (jogging the rest backwards and starting from where we stopped each time to get a rough idea of pace). Ran mostly with Peter, averaged about 4:45/mile on the ons and roughly 6:30s on the offs. Felt great, kept it easy. 3 down.

Thursday- AM- 3 very slow, 23:45 (actually, I just kinda wandered around Allston for that long and called it 3). PM- Longer River Loop easy (50min) then added on some barefoot Nickerson for 62min tot. Real easy run today, felt good. My new mattress FINALLY came in and lo and behold, I slept restfully for the first time in weeks and my growing back pain largely disappeared.

Friday- AM- 3 easy with Ken from the house, 22:30. Sleep was of the highest quality. . .quantity could have been better, though. PM- 67min easy, Res to Res with extra lap at Brookline, last couple miles in the 6:20s range, calling it 10.

Saturday- AM- 9 easy, 61min (last 15 or so barefoot on Nickerson) rainy weather, felt great again. Did 6 strides with Eric indoors; I love that track of ours.

Sunday- Noon- 3 up, strides. 5mi race in 25:49.99 at Vermont. This was probably the toughest course I've run on in college- there were no flat sections the entire time; you're either climbing or descending. The grass was pretty thick, I wore spikes and still slipped around an awful lot. Still, this is probably the most competitive I've raced in college cross country. I learned a lot and gained a lot from racing those two longer distances this summer. Peter and I also got to hear Bruce tell some stories about Jerry "Awesome" Lawson, a former American Record holder in the marathon and BU alum. Bruce said Awesome Larson (which rhymes if you say it with the right accent) used to always go out hard and die, but would fight back again because he conceptualized feeling bad in a race as just "running through a bad patch." Thinking of feeling like shit at 5k in an 8k race as a "bad patch" sort of presupposes that eventually the bad patch will pass and you can run hard again. That idea definitely helped in my race- this is the first 5miler I really felt like I was racing hard the whole way, instead of in the past where I've made it to about 2.5-3.5 miles and thought "fuck, at this point I just want to keep going forward." Anyway, I was 7th overall, 2nd BU guy (Eric won, looking pretty damn good in 25:24). UNH and UVM beat us team-wise but I'm not concerned at all. Eric, myself, and Peter (our top 3 today) raced a little over the summer and we're just a little sharper than some of our teammates. Now that they have a race under their belt, I'm confident the gap between our 2-6 guys will shrink dramatically. 3 down, 4+ hour ride back home. 7PM- Easy River Loop with Ken James and Eric, 29:49, felt great. Probably a good idea to shake the bus ride out of our legs.

Tot- 85

All in all, a good week- one lighter workout and a hard 5mile race with good competitive drive. Next week will be much of the same- a light workout and the BU Invite at Franklin Park. After running pretty well on a tough course, I'm looking forward to seeing what I can do at fast, flat, and firm-footed Franklin (sorry- we're covering Anglo-Saxon poetry in Brit Lit and I can't stop alliterating. How wyrd of me).

Hope all the cross country folk out there had good season openers!