My Look, Indeed

Jesus, it'd be hard to take a worse photo* than that [for those who can't see the photo, click here]. But I'm brave, and I'll show it to you 'cause it was just before the finish line, and I was going all out**. If the finish line had been another 100 yards along, you would have got to see me barf in the photo, too. I can point with some pride to my hair in this photo, which is flowing, due to my incredible speed.

I did, as I thought, come in 8th in AG. Fastest age group time was 20:53, which? Not gonna happen for me, not if I lost another 20 and took steroids. I came in smack dab in the middle of the whole race, 91/175. These were some fast folks, on average. But I did beat a guy in Rex Kwon Do pants, which was all my family had asked of me at the starting line, and it looks like I beat everyone under 10 years of age, which was extremely gratifying after my last performance. Oh, and they recorded my time as 26:59, which I'll grudgingly take, even though it's more than the 26:56 I had, being that it's still on the right side of 27:00.

I took Saturday off, and ran light yesterday and today, but felt/feel like a large pile of cold congealed over-buttered mashed potatoes. Part is hormonal (bleah), part is an incoming heat wave, part is our *&$% neighbor's cat who appears to be in heat, but only lets us know from 4:00am to 8:00am every morning, but maybe a tiny part is the same thing that made me look like I do in this photo, so I'm thinking I need either another day off entirely or another extremely slow day before I start in on the speed work I'm supposed to be doing tomorrow.

*copyright, as you might imagine, Ed Jay, 2008.

** Upon reflection, I'm also more than a little pleased with how relaxed my hands and arms are, because I wasn't thinking about that in the push at the end. No wonder my shoulder felt fine after the race, unlike after most speed sessions.