[7/29/12] Health updates, an unexpected 5K race, a new stride, and the results of the new stride and what it means for the half marathon:

Hi everyone!!

There are only 5 weeks left until my first half marathon! I can't believe how time has flown since I started training almost 5 months ago. I've been asked how my health has been and, since my hip injury, I've felt pretty much close to 100%. I've also been asked why I've taken so much time to train and condition and my answer to that is because of my legs/feet. I don't want to risk re-injuring my feet post-surgery (it's been about 2 years since my surgery on my left foot) and, to prevent injury, I'm really leaving nothing to chance.

So, about this unexpected 5K race. I'm doing the Terrapin 5K race in Chicago on Thursday, August 2nd because I want to qualify for the 1:40:00 corral for race day. My reasoning is that I do NOT want to be stuck behind a horde of people who will not be going at the pace I would like to go at. Because I couldn't reach my time goal for the Davis Moo-nlight Race... to seed at the 1:40:00 corral for race day I have to run this 5K in 20:30 (6:50/mile). I'm not 100% sure if I can hit that mile split and that pace, however, so if I don't reach that first goal, my absolute cutoff time for this 5K is 21:40 (7:10-7:15/mile) for the 1:48:00 corral. If I get in the 1:48:00 corral, I don't think that will affect my performance on race day too much. I'll post race results when they come out!

So.... about this new stride. After reading a lot of running magazines and watching the US olympic trials (and, very soon, track and field/cross country at the olympics!) I noticed that the distance runners had a different stride than I had. After asking one of my good friends who is training to be an occupational therapist, I was told that this was one the most efficient and stamina saving stride for distance running. To describe it... it kind of looks like a shuffling stride/shuffling step. After trying it out... I noticed that I could run for longer periods of time AND I could run faster without too much pain! Here is my most recent and exciting result of this new stride:

Note: The red line dips are stoplights :( I don't really like city street running...

At the end of the run, my endurance definitely tapered off but all of this was basically continuous (including stop lights...) so I'm very encouraged by this result. The next two days will be recovery days at the gym with cardio on the machine, a light run on Wednesday with a leg workout, then race day on Thursday!

That's all for now! With 5 weeks left I'm not quite at my charity goal yet so please continue to spread the word!

God Bless!

Marc