Friday, May 3, 2013

Running, running, running...

  A few weeks ago I posted about running a half marathon... well since then I have raced 4 more times!! To be honest by the end of this block of training I was pretty much raced out!

The week after the half marathon I raced a 5km race -  getting the fastest 5km time since before Ethan was born! That race took a lot out of me.... more so than the 21.1 km the week before! It probably didn't help that I had the beginnings of strep throat either!

I had another week of light training, and then the day before we were flying to NZ we drove the Bunbury so that I could race another half marathon! I thought that I would do around 2 - 3 minutes faster over the half marathon than the race a couple of weeks before.... however the events of the week leading up to this race were not very conducive to good sports performance.

Firstly Ethan decided to not sleep very well at all for that entire week! Then I had a really, incredibly busy week at work, which also coincided with a number of surgeon/specialist appointments for Ethan as well as his CT scan! At the surgeon's appointment it was decided that Ethan would be in for surgery the week that we were due to arrive back in Australia.

True to his non-sleeping form, the night before the bunbury race Ethan had a terrible night. As a consequence, I was up from around 2am.... one thing I have discovered since having a baby, is that pre-race rest (or post race recovery for that matter) is just not the same as it used to be!

I started this race well but by about km 9 I knew it wasn't going to be a good day.... from then on I battled the desire to just give up and save myself for another day.... but I carried on and finished the race. I was pretty physically spent by the end of the race and not 100% happy with the result even though it was (very marginally) faster than the Darlington half marathon and also my fastest post baby half marathon.
We flew to NZ the next day. While I was in NZ I ran 2 races. The first was the Lower Hutt park run 5km - which I won.
The second race was a very muddy trail run. Which I one my age group and came second overall for the distance that I did.
So all in all a very busy few weeks for running! and there is no rest for the wicked as I have a few more races planned for the coming weeks as well!

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