Leg Egg, Cinco de Mayo 5k

Yesterday I realized that I had exactly five weeks until my marathon. I guess that means I should actually stick to my training schedule, since I only have a few more weeks of long runs and then the rest is taper. Yesterday I got my June edition of Runners World magazine, and there was a poll that asks “How do you feel about tapering?” Here’s the breakdown:

• It makes me feel antsy – 55%
• Love the rest and free time – 27%
• I can take it or leave it – 7%
• Totally hate it – 7%
• It’s harder than training – 4%

People are weird. Tapering is awesome – it’s like you just put in all this hard work and now you get to just sit there and hardly work at all, which seems like a bad idea, but it’s actually the best way to prepare for a big race. Why would you not enjoy it? As easy as running a lot is, not running is even easier. Which is exactly what I did for almost the entire last week.

I have a couple excuses, kind of. First of all, the weather has been way too weird for me to deal with. Second, I got too insane with the Insanity DVDs and pulled a hamstring. Third, I got really drunk Friday night and was way too hungover on Saturday to run. Then when I was able to get my energy up a little, I had a soccer game and this happened:

As usual, the picture doesn’t really do it justice at all, but I didn’t want to make Laura stand there taking tons of pictures of it, so I settled for this one. This picture represents the combination of a huge shinguard fail and a knee (somebody else’s, not my own) in my shin. The good news is that I didn’t let this stop me and I scored two goals after this and our team won 10-2. While the other team was quite skilled at putting knees in my shin, they weren’t particularly great at scoring or keeping themselves from being scored on.

This morning my leg kind of hurt so I skipped running (I did Insanity tonight though, so I’m still on track for UHB), but I also had other running related things to focus on: today was Laura’s first 5k! Laura’s my awesome friend/roommate, by the way. We used to do a different blog together, but it’s been a while since we posted. If you want more of me/her though, feel free to peruse Project Bacon Weave. Back to the run. Even though Cinco de Mayo is on Wednesday, the run was today, because nobody wants a 5k on a Wednesday. I think there was a total of about five spectators. This is not an exaggeration. The run also had a weird twist at the end, which was a complete lack of direction during the final stretch down Naito. Naito runs along the river and is divided by a sidewalk with a few trees in the middle. The route took the runners down one side of the road, but they were supposed to cross over at some point to cross the finish line. Once the first people had finished, and people were coming in with bigger groups they started crossing to the proper side with plenty of time, but those first few people were super confused and just crossed over at the very end. It was weird, and really anti-climactic because the announcer didn’t even notice that the 5k had been won until a minute after and then he was like “Oh! We have our first 5k finishers!” Nice going, announcer.

The best part about this run was that about a month ago Laura randomly decided to try doing a 5k for the first time ever, after previously not being that into running at all, and gradually progressed until she could do a 5k in a pretty good time! I’m impressed.

Enough about her. My goal this week is to go running five times. Somehow I’ve managed to make it this whole year without ever running more than four times in a week. Five weeks before a marathon feels like an appropriate time to start increasing the frequency a little, so I’m going to see how this goes.

Running skirt update:

Today we saw only 3 running skirts. I can’t find the numbers on the Cinco de Mayo run, but last year there was a total of 923 participants, so we’ll use that. That means only 0.003% wore them.

Katy of Arizona gave me an update on running skirts in the Whiskey Row marathon/half in Prescott, where she saw 12. With 1,408 participants, that’s still just 0.008%. Once I’m done with the online statistics class I’m taking, I’ll be able to break down these numbers for you a bit more, and put some meaning too them. In the mean time I need to collect more data, and of course your own running skirt findings are more than welcome.

Miles run this week: 0
Miles run in 2010: 336