I still don’t suck when it comes to running apparently. Yes, that statement seems a bit random, so let me give you some context. A friend and I did a 1600 meter race today (essentially, it’s a mile and I cannot recall which is actually longer), and I ran a 5:11. I really wanted to break five minutes this year when this was planned, but we didn’t do it in August like we had originally intended, and I haven’t been running much as of late (school and sleep tend to have a bit higher priority). Not that running in August would have mattered much since I wasn’t running much more then than I am now.
I fully expected to run poorly today, but I managed to impress myself (and the person I was running against I think). The first 400 meters was at 1:17, second at 2:34 (1:17, so even splits there), and I couldn’t hear my timer because the wind was blowing too hard for the third one. Not quite negative splits (that’s running faster each lap), but still pretty darn good as far as I am concerned. I was shooting for 1:15 – 1:20 for each lap so that would put me at 5:00 – 5:20 for an overall time, so I still hit my goal.
The worst part of it all is that there was some piece of equipment jettisoning out into the first two and a half lanes on one of the turns that we didn’t see until we were already started. By then it wasn’t worth moving them (we had already ran about 250 meters at race pace). I figure we would have shaved off two to three seconds on our times easily if it wasn’t there (along with the benches in lane one in the straightaway before the start/finish line). Oh well, there’s always next year though, right?
We even had two “cheerleaders” come out to root us on, although I can’t say I ever heard any cheering as I went by. The wind was loud though, so maybe they were just cheering softly?