Saturday, April 26, 2008 [5M]

Lately I have been looking for some road races to get myself in, since I think that's a good way to get into shape. The Big Sur 5K this coming Sunday was one of the races I was considering and I knew there would be good competition since it was part of the PAUSATF road racing circuit. I had been debating for a few days about racing and was leaning against it since I was sick for most of the week and was also a bit concerned about the effect of running two 5Ks on back to back weekends. Ordinarily I would have probably opted against racing but eventually I decided to sign up for reasons that were not so much relating to racing itself. We were supposed to get some beautiful weather this weekend, Sunday is the Greek Easter and I had plans to spend the day in Santa Cruz and with the race taking place in Carmel I thought I had a good excuse to spend my entire weekend in the area and just get in the race to get a good workout. I drove down this morning with Rachel, spent the day around Monterrey and Carmel and went for a short run on the course around 5. The course is pretty scenic but I'm sure times tomorrow will be slow. There's a fairly big hill in the first mile then almost the entire second mile is on a narrow dirt/sand path along the ocean, which will make it hard to run very fast. I'm only concerned about putting in a hard effort and don't care at all about times so I definitely don't mind if the course is slow. We wound up back at the car after 40 minutes, which is probably a long 5 but I don't think I can round up. I wasn't really trying to save my legs for tomorrow or anything but since this week ended up being short anyway I couldn't find any motivation to add on a few more miles.