What ever it takes!

6:00 am, somehow ended up in Monterey California this morning, not sure how that happened. We got in pretty late last night,  got to bed at about Midnight but still woke up first thing ready for a run.  Asked the Hotel Clerk where to run and he told me there was a really nice trail that ran along the beach.  So I headed aimlessly out,  temperature was perfect, found the trail and followed it until it ended which was about 2.5 miles and turned back twards the hotel, noticed that the trail extended the other way so I took that for another mile past "Fishermans Warf" and the SeaLions and then turned back for a total of 7 miles.

Great place to run, tomorrow I think I'll start out going the opposite way and see how far the trail goes that way. 

6:00 am.   Wow!! That's all I can really say about this mornings run, This is the reason we run, for mornings like this.  Perfect weather, ran along the coastal highway along the beach with the sun coming up over the ocean, waves crashing against the rocks.  I didn't have a camera, I may just need to drive back there to get pictures.

There were little hard packed sand trails that wound through wild flowers up on the cliffs looking down over the ocean.  Anyway, I'm not much of a writer but it was an amazing run.  Averaged 6:27 min/mile without even realizing I was running, wish I had more time before I had to work, I could have easily ran 20 today before I even realized I was working.

http://connect.garmin.com/activity/33128518

Really wanted to take one last run on the beach this morning, but was warned that traffic on the 101 that time of morning would be horrible and I wouldn't make my flight.  So instead I woke up at 3:30 am, caught the 6:30 flight home and did a quick 5 miler with the dog around the neighborhood.  Found a really nice trail I didn't know existed before, was pretty muddy, nothing like running with 6 lbs of mud on your shoes to get you ready for a race.

It always make me feel good about myself when I have to drag the Border Collie the last mile cause I ran her to hard.  :)

6:00 am. Recovery run today on the treadmill with a little speed work.  8x100's. Got a nice massage last night from Britt, felt really good and relaxed today.  Have a little bit of a head cold hopefully it's more of an annoyance than anything.  Got 2 days to get over it.

Easy 4 tomorrow and I should be ready for the big day.

4 mile easy warmup run

We will chalk this one up as inexperience on my part.  My goal was to get a 2:45, which should have been attainable based on my training runs.  I had a plan to go out fairly fast 5:40's for the first mile or so and then settle into an even 6:00 pace as long as I could hold it.  I started up towards the front right behind BJ, Jeff, and Fritz, which was a honor in it self to run with these guys, for 100 meters or so :).  Minus BJ who just took off, I was glad to find out he was doing the relay.

I started out following the plan pretty close, it went something like this for the first 1/2

Mile 1  5:45

Mile 2  6:06

Mile 3  6:03

Mile 4  5:59

Mile 5  6:06

Mile 6  6:12

Mile 7  6:04

Mile 8  6:12

Mile 9  6:26

Mile 10 6:21

Mile 11 6:38

Mile 12 6:33

Mile 13 6:41

It slowed down after 8 due to the course flattening out.  I was actually quite happy when I hit the 1/2 Marathon start line at 1:21.  I wasn't looking forward to the upcoming hills but knew that after that was all downhill.  I made it through the hills pretty easlily and feeling good, I even did mile 17 in 6:46, which I was very pleased with, since it was the big hill.  At about mile 18 I started feeling some tightening in the legs and decided to stop for a quick leg stretch at the next aid station.  This is when it all went down hill (not in a good way), I stopped and did a quad stretch and immediatly my hamstring cramped up in a huge ball of muscle.  After that the entire race quickly went down hill and all my goals slipped away quickly.  I couldn't get back into any rythm again and could hardly go 1/4 miles without stopping to stretch again.

I ended up with a 3:04:44, which is by far my PR, but very disapointing since I was so close and on track to meet my goal up until about mile 20.  Well lesson learned, I'll try and redeem myself this fall in Logan.

In DC for 2 weeks now and I think I'll take it easy for a while, maybe some short (non-Garmin) runs to get my mind back on track.