1st race

Well, last week I ran my first race in quite a few months - the LI Marathon 'Festival of Races' 10k. I have been running sporadically for a few weeks after nursing a nagging lower leg injury for a while. My longest run to date was ~3.5 miles so this would be a challenge to get through it a live to tell about it ;-)

I woke up and my Wingman/Sherpa drove me to the race. I told him that I was going 'old school' for this race - no HRM or watch. I was going to run on perceived exertion. Since I hadn't really been running much, I had no time goals. So the gun goes off and so do I. I had my iPod shuffle on just to have something to listen to.

Oddly enough, I ran a nice even pace throughout the entire race. A woman even came up to to me afterwards to tell me she was running behind me and I paced her well. Phew, I was afraid that she was going to tell me I spit on her during the run or something.

When I crossed that finish line I actually had a great sense of accomplishment. It felt like the first time I had a really good run in a long time. I almost felt like the running I had done over the last few weeks was just junk miles. It was like I had finally run with a purpose.