A real disaster of a week. I struggled to recover from the 5 mile race last week and the 5 days of 90+ degree heat did not help. I had a pretty good run at the Tom Walton 10k but after 3.5 miles my foot started to hurt and by 5 miles I was limping badly. I managed to finish but was hobbled after. My streak of not missing a day of running ended just a week shy of a full year. Hopefully I can turn this around quickly, feels like I strained some ligaments from favoring that leg (my knee and ankle had both been bothering me this week). I was able to bike on Sunday so that is somewhere to start.
The 304thplace finish at the USATF NE 5 mile championships was in fact my second worst finishing place ever. My 3,651th place at the Boston Marathon tops the list. With 1605 races I’ve finished in the top 10 exactly 1200 times (75%). Below are the 39 times that I’ve finished 100thplace or worse (2% of all finishes). All of the results on my “worst place” list are at USATF New England championships except for Boston and the Cheap Marathon. That speaks to the depth of a NE championship. Also, only 8 of the results are not in the last 10 years and that is a simple explanation that as I get older I get slower and work my way further and further back in the field. Most of the races are road (again not surprising as they have bigger fields), five are cross-country races and one is a mountain race that I WALKED so that I could earn my Mountain Goat status. I also sorted the list on percentage of the field that beat me and four of the top five are cross-country. No big surprises there as XC fields may not be big but they are DEEP. The list topper is the Mayor’s Cup where they specifically state that if you can’t run under 30 minutes (for 8k) you should run the Citizen’s 5k!
