Things fall apart

On Saturday I was truly inspired after watching the 10 000m at Payton Jordan.  I was planning on racing the 10 000m, had a flight booked and eight Speed River athletes were also racing so I decided to go out there anyways.  It was bittersweet watching such an exciting race and not being able to toe the line.  The weather was perfect for the 10 000m (it was windy for many of the earlier races) and people put down some HUGE personal bests.  It was great to see Bairu set the Canadian record (he ran 27:23, old record was 27:36), but did he really have to beat it by that much? HAHA.  I’ve had 27:35 in my head for a few years now but if I’m not even going to get to the start line then the record might as well get obliterated.  Watching a race like that really gets me motivated to train hard, which at this point, with my injury, is very frustrating.

With no race on the schedule I played the part of tourist on this trip and explored San Francisco.

Before SF I was in NYC for the NB Canadian retailers Pre-line.  Here’s a pic of the Chrysler building in the distance from SoHo.

I feel that I’m about 4-5 days away from running normally again, however I’ve been saying that for 45 days now.  So my plan to wait until I was healthy before I wrote another blog seemed like a good idea but reality has set in and I’m really not convinced anymore about that 4-5 day timeline.  I ran 6km this morning and it felt OK but I could tell that if I was to push it anymore then I’d run into problems.   The goal this week it to get some questions answered about my injury. 

A good story about the new changes to the funding system in Canadian athletics is here.

Two weeks ago I did the Tour de Greater Hamilton.  The Tour de GH spans five days and involves 350km of biking on a fixie, a couple of one hour sessions on the elliptical and a smorgasbord of buttertarts and cookies.  I made sure each ride averaged at least 30km/hr and since I would climb up the escarpment in the first 8km of my ride I would spend the rest of the ride getting my average speed above the 30km/hr threshold before I got back to the descent of the escarpment.  On each ride I would pick a country bakery and a landmark and bike to them,  stop in the country bakery, eat some baked goodies and get on with the rest of the ride.  I was tired of banging my head on ellipticals and spin bikes and decided to just have some fun while maintaining some level of fitness, mission accomplished.