As I promised, here is the picture of my medal... or should I say Adryana's medal..if you click on it, you will see an up close picture of it. Yesterday was for sure my best running performance yet, and I just wanted to enjoy it because it is always so cool to see my fitness levels improve, and see it come to fruition in a race. As great as marathon training has been, I know I made significant improvements in my fitness during that time, without question... but when you can't translate it into a good race, its a bit disheartening. But I do realize that I won't always do this. Most people don't get 2 1/2 minute improvements in their 5k times over 1 year, so I realize that it is probably not an attainable goal to ask for the same improvements next year...but maybe???? Well, this is how my brain works... I have already thought of what I would like to do by the end of the summer, by the end of the year, and for next years Draft Day Dash 5k. Some of you might call me psycho.. which is fine... I call it goal driven. Once you have the goal and vision in place, you now know what you have to do to get there... and anything less than getting there is a disappointment. But if you do get there, then you smile constantly for like the last 36 hours like I have done between yesterday and today. For me, that is my profession. Everyday, I see people with injuries from minor to devastating. And the way I have my patients mentally cope with their rehabilitation is to break up their total rehab time into meeting specific goals. If we don't meet the goal, we don't move on to the next. And it gives us hope and excitement in seeing improvement little by little. That's why its such an awesome job, because if everybody puts in the appropriate effort, we usually get there and it feels good for me and obviously even better for the patient. When we don't, it is a disappointment, and we have to regroup, refocus and make new goals. Simple as that.. so for me, it's no different....
By the end of the summer, I want to have a 5k time of under 20 min. I feel that is completely attainable, but since I will not be doing a lot of speed work and more distance running, I feel as though that will not be as easy as it sounds... It's only 17 seconds, so hopefully it will be done. Hopefully after the Chicago Marathon, I will be healthy enough to just take a few weeks off and get back to running, so I will not lose much fitness and be able to pull off a 19:30 5k by the end of December 2008. By this time next year, God willing, I would like to take off 1:18 from my 5k. Yes, 18:59... not sure if I can really do that, but I'm going for it. I realize that if I am in that range, I can start looking at getting medals in races because I actually might place in my age group... I feel as though a low 19, high 18 5k, will do that for me. That would just be awesome!!!! So, that's my little 5k goals that I have for 2008.
The really challenging thing that happens after a race that you do well in, is that you have to change your training paces. For the last few weeks my training runs have been quite easy for me, reason being that my fitness had improved and everything was becoming quite manageable. But now that I have a race that has shown that improvement, all of my times for my runs have to be faster now, to continue to see improvements in my times. So this week will be a challenging one for sure. I'm kinda looking forward to my run tomorrow, which will be an 8 miler with some mid-distance interval spurts in there, but I am kinda worried about my Thursday tempo run, which has to be run at 7:00/mile for 4 miles.... sounds kinda hard to me.... never done that before, so I guess we will see.
So here is something that is pretty cool... today I was at church and Kerry and I were teaching the 3-5 year old kids, which we do like 2x/month. One of the ushers usually pass by to get a head count of the amount of kids that are in the nursery, our class, and the 2-3 year old class also. This week, when one of the ushers popped their head in, he looked at me and said, "Did you get it?" so... I'm like thinking in my head... what is he talking about??? So, I didn't want to seem as clueless as I really am... so I said "Yes!", but I honestly had no idea what he was talking about.... so he kept on talking and said that he was so happy that I got the MEDAL!!!!! I felt like such an idiot.... but anyways, he said that he was praying for me yesterday morning before my race, and it made me feel so good!!!! So basically, I tell you all that because I thank all of you that read the blog on a regular basis, and I thank you all for your prayers yesterday, and any day for that matter, and also that you would take the time to read my thoughts about something that is so trivial to most (running that is...), but so special to me right now. It's always nice to know that you could be in the midst of something, and someone might be praying for God's protection or direction on you at that moment??? The power of prayer... good stuff....
