What Roadkill’s Been Up To…

For those of you that live in western or upstate New York, you know what the weather has been like lately.  Last year we were spoiled by an exceptionally mild winter (except, of course, on the days that a Freezeroo race occurred).  This year we seem to be enjoying a more typical winter, as evidenced by the several feet of snow and slush on the roads.

The first Freezeroo, the Bill Curran Memorial 5K, took place on Saturday, December 14th.  A good amount of snow had fallen in the day or two prior, and the roads that morning looked like they hadn’t been plowed in some time.  On top of that, the course we ran went on a bike path through a park and various parking lots, which made footing very treacherous.  As a result, the race was decidedly not a fast race.  I finished 3rd overall behind fellow Roadkill Racer Kenny Goodfellow and Dave Rappleyea.  Kenny and Dave are sub-16:00 runners, and the three of us all ran from 17:25 to 17:37.  Not a fast race at all.

Everyone has limits.  There is only so much physical and mental stress that one can take before breakdown occurs.  Sometimes, those limits are hard to find. For some, injury usually strikes before the “true” limit is reached, when bodily processes start to break down beyond the point of recovery, and time off is forced.  For others, the symptoms of overtraining (which vary widely from person to person) set in, and if that person has common sense, he or she will force time off, or else injury soon follows (I’ve been in both groups at some point, but those are stories for another day).

It’s a good time for me to look back at the past year and look to goals in the year ahead.  Frankly, though, I’ve never really done that at the end of the year.  I started recording mileage in the summer of 2008, but what good is data that is recorded and never used? Here are my mileage totals from 2009 to this year.  Although I don’t use a GPS, these totals are probably fairly close. I always assume 7:00 pace for easy runs, despite the actual pace, and it seems to average itself out in the long haul.