The Pros and Cons of Breathing...

Saturday I went up to Morgan State to run my first 1500 in over a year. I'd been feeling like crap the whole week mostly due to the lack of sleep I'd been getting. I let myself have way too many things on my mind that week and wasn't focusing on the small things (like getting enough sleep) to be really ready for the race. The workout on Tuesday went ok, but I felt like shit from the start. Thursday was fine but it was just 200's so if it had gone badly I would have had ample reason to be concerned about how Saturday would go.

Anyway, I go up to AU the morning of the race to take one of the guys on the team up there with me. I figure its the least I can do to help out whenever I can with the team. Ride up with Ryan was fine, didn't get lost which was the major concern seeing as the school is in some random part of Baltimore. We beat the team up there so we just check in and hang out for a little while. I get to see the heat sheets when we arrive and I'm in the first of two heats. The fact that me and only two of the AU kids are in that heat lets me know I just missed the cut off for the "fast" heat. I only have myself to be pissed with though because I chose to seed myself at 3:58, I should have seeded myself at 3:55 to make sure I was in the fast heat. While looking over the heat sheets I also notice that there are two heats of the Women's 1500 which is the event before mine so I factor that into my warm up.

All of us running the 1500 go for the warm up together, but by the time we come back we're seeing the end of the Women's 1500, which normally would be fine but they had combined both heats into one. This meant that they intended to start the Men's 1500 20 minutes ahead of schedule. Luckily, Bridget convinced them to wait (she had significant pull too seeing as the majority of the runners there for the 1500 were AU kids). As we line up for the first heat I realize that the one guy who was seeded ahead of me has scratched from the race. So I'm lined up on the inside, as the gun goes off I make sure to get out a little bit so I'm not trapped in the back but I expect one of the other guys in the heat to take the lead. To my surprise I'm in the lead from the gun without much work at all. As I come through 300m I have a bad flashback to a race my sophmore year at Duke where I took out the first two laps of a 5k because I thought I was that much better than everyone in my heat...I ended up dying horribly. I come through the 400 at 64 feeling really smooth though. I don't look back but at 600m's in I can tell I'm entirely alone (later all the AU guys told me I had a 20 to 30m lead on the rest of the field from the 400m mark on). I tried to turn it into a time trial, but for some reason it was hard as hell to breath, I had cotton mouth the whole way. Legs felt fine but breathing was horrible, I managed to run 4:05 by myself. It wasn't a great race and I know I let sub 4 get away from me. The things I took away from the race were, I always have to be prepared to lead from the gun, I need to work on staying mentally sharp when I do run on my own, and 4:05 (a 3 sec PR) felt comfortable.

Tomorrow its back to work; over the next few weeks I'm going to try and race a lot (probably even throwing a road race in there....GW PARKWAY), hopefully its all going to pay off.