Work Bites

All right, I know I haven’t posted in several days. I'll work to get additional race reports up over the weekend. Work has sucked so far this week and I simply haven’t had a chance to write much of anything. I’ve gotten a couple of 3-milers in this week, but had to skip again today due to meetings – I'm hoping to knock out 5 or so early tomorrow before starting in on the yardwork. Hope everyone is having fun pounding the pavement!

2009 Mini Race Report (Part 1)

Since I don’t really have a whole lot of other stuff to write about, I'm going to stretch the race recap out as long as I can. This also helps me avoid doing any actual work as I sit here at my desk.

<-- Neither of these people are me


Pre-Race
Every year, people start to freak out about traffic, parking and getting into their corrals in time. After my 2nd year, I started playing things casually and not sweating it so much. For those of you familiar with Indianapolis, the start line runs from the State Museum back Washington street to the Artsgarden – it takes a lot of space to cram 35,000 people and they tend to use every inch. As a result, a lot of the road on the west side of downtown are closed – or congested. However, the last several years, I simple come down the other side and park on the east side of the circle. No traffic and no problems.

With the race starting at 7:30, I had pre-arranged a meet with 3 of the guys from work whom I had been (on and off) training with for the last month or so. I parked the car about 6 and hit up one of the hotels to take care of some “business” pre-race. I also liberally applied the Tiger Balm to my lower back in the hopes of avoiding any mid-race flare-ups. This stuff is amazing. I waffled on what to wear a couple of times, since the weather yokels couldn’t make up their minds on what the temps were actually going to be. I ended up opting for short sleeves with a long-sleeve shirt over top that I planned to dump as soon as we got rolling. About 6:30, I hooked up with two of the other guys (John and Jeremy – we couldn’t find TW) and we started to make our way down to the starting corrals. I needed to check a bag, so that meant a walk up the entire column of runners – a bit of a pain, but John and I jogged back to the corral afterwards, which was a good way to get the blood moving. We were starting back in R because John got dumped there and couldn’t move forward - even though he was probably going to beat Jeremy and I rather handily. Usually, it seems like you are milling around in the corral for ages before anything happens, but this year I think they pulled the ropes earlier than in years past and people started to move forward. Because of hotel construction right at the start line, we were being told that the wait to get going would be longer than in previous years. That was putting it mildly

Mini Report - Brief

Mini completed - fell short of last year by about 4 minutes, so could have been better, but it was fun. Full report and pictures coming later

First Post and Mini Prep

Well, while I'm probably not nearly as good of a writer as most of the other folks out there writing running blogs – and I'm certainly not as good of a runner, I figured I would start chronicling my running experiences. Hopefully someone somewhere might enjoy it a bit.

As I write this, I'm now less than 24 hours away from the start of the Indianapolis Mini Marathon; supposedly the largest in the US. This will be my 5^th one, and I'll be out there with 35,000 of my closest friends. Hoping the rain holds off and the temps stay in the upper 50’s like they are saying.

On Wednesday, I woke up with back spasms that got progressive worse throughout the day. After trying to “fix” them by laying flat on my back that night, I ended up almost not being able to get back to my feet. Not that I’ve been training for a PR this time out, but I was feeling pretty good about the race, so needless to say, the back had me pretty down. It has been improving steadily for the last two days – helped along by liberal applications of heat and Tiger Balm, which is amazing stuff. One more day of it and I should be in decent shape to go.

More coming later!