This was a local 8K I ran. It turned out to be a race that I didn't do quite as well as I had hoped.
Here's what I thought of it in 1997:
The week was the toughest running I've down this fall. My legs even hurt while I slept. I had
a good hill workout and then did a good speed workout with eight reps with five
minutes hard (average heart rate of 165-170) and two minutes easy (I rode in a limo courtesy of
Steve Beering). From Monday to Saturday I had run 80 miles.
A friend of mine, Njema Fraizer, was visiting for the weekend. She was due to arrive
Saturday at noon. I had a lot house cleaning that I put off until Saturday
morning, which I finished at 11:30am. I couldn't leave my place because Njema was due, but I
still needed a seven mile run. So I ran laps around the blocks near my house,
stopping in every 20 minutes to check for messages on the answering machine. The laps took about 5
minutes. I put in about 7.5 miles that way! I also got stung by a bee or wasp
or some other sort of stinging insect. The sting was on the outside/back of my
right ankle and hurt like hell. Of course that happened on the first lap, so I
ran the rest of the workout in so much pain that a normal human would have chewed
off his leg.
Sunday morning I got up at 6:30am and made it to the CoRec by 7:00am.
I felt okay, the bagel I had was sitting in my stomach like a rock though and
my right ankle was swollen from the bee sting. I did a 12:00 warmup, partly
with Tom Miller. Next I spent some time chatting with Njema and
Sarah Roberts, Paul Loomis, Tony Grieg and Vladimir Gusiatnikov.
By the start I'd said hello to Bill, the Ironman guy, and a few other
people I new. The gun went off and I took it out too fast. For about a
quarter mile I was in third. But I slowed my pace and let people move ahead, trying
not to tire out to early. I settled into a nice slot at the end of the first
big group.
My first mile split was 5:49 and I didn' feel like shit. But I didn't
have tons of energy. I'd put in about 80 miles in the previous six days and 90
miles the week before, and 80 miles before that and 65 miles before that and 75 miles before that and 75 miles before that and so on.
I wasn't well rested at all. But still . . .
Well, still I could manage to suck! The next mile came up at 11:47.
Still a sub-6:00, but I was slowing. I felt like I was working hard and that
my legs weren't really heavy, but I wasn't moving too fast. Just after mile
two I heard a guy thundering up behind me. It turned out to be Tom, cruising a long
picking people off. His first mile was a 6:05 and he had powered down to a 5:30
pace and was rocketting towards the leaders.
There was no way I could keep up with him. I didn't have my heart rate monitor
on, but I was really breathing hard. Not horribly so, I had a nice rhythm
going and felt okay, but tired. I pressed a bit, but really didn't manage
much. By the turn around I was in a no man's land. About 30 seconds from the
guy in front of me and 30 seconds before the guy behind me. I pressed, but
knew I couldn't catch the guy in front of me and was sure that the guy behind
me had no chance to get me. This is how it went the rest of the way.
At three miles I was 17:52, still a sub-6:00 pace, but I'd just run a
6:05 mile. Mile four came at 23:48, I'd sucked it up for another sub-6:00 and we
had a downhill and less than a mile. Rounding the corner across from Hort Park
I peaked behind me to see no one within half a mile, but I was about a quarter
of a mile behind the guy ahead of me.
I crossed the finish line in 8th place with a 29:24.24, a 5:56 pace. I
was happy that I'd broken 30, but not too happy to have run 15 seconds slower than last year and a minute off my personal record.
That's the way it's been before my last two marathons, running slow races because of the intense training. If the
trend holds of running bad races before the marathon and then running a good
marathon, I'm in good shape for
Chicago. There are a few more races to run: the
Apple-Popcorn Classic,
the Prophets Town Run and the
Great Race. I'm starting
a slow taper with 75 miles this week. I had a decent hill workout this morning
and will run 10 by four minutes hard with one minute rest for a speed workout
Sunday. Next week I'll drop the overall mileage a bit more and move one
workout to the track for a 400m repeat workouts. As the weeks progress
I'll put in more and more track time and do all my speed drills. By the Great
Race I should be a bit faster and by the marathon I should be as fast as I can
get.
Back to the Running Vita of James B. Elliott