An Ultimate Run and Season Done

I went home this weekend to run in my last "track meet" of the season.  The Ultimate Runner is organized by the Twin City Track Club of Winston-Salem and is hands down my favorite event of the year.  Participants compete in each of the 1600, 400, 800, 100 meter runs and finish up with a 5k cross country.  After a 5th-place finish last year, I was hoping to have similar success.  I seemed to forget what kind of runner I am, turning in my best times in the 400 and 100 meter events.  However, track season left me with tired legs, a tweaked achilles tendon, and a 14th-place finish this year out of a 108-person field.  I blame myself, but Saturday just wasn't my night.

So track season is finished for another year.  And while I return to the track each spring, eager and excited to run faster events, I am quite happy now to hang up the spikes for 8 months.  So ends, also, the 2010-2011 running year for me.  Yet a year that started with promise last August may look something like a sophomore slump now.  My first 5k of the year at the Whirlie Alumni Run resulted in a PR, and in my first Carolina Club meet which was (supposed to be) 5 miles, I ran the first 5k of the race faster than that PR in August.  Things were certainly looking good.  I didn't know at the time, however, that I had fractured a bone in my foot.  Cross country: over.  After returning from that injury, I came back in 4 weeks to run a half-marathon PR before Christmas.  In track, the couple of meets I got to run, I ran sloppy splits and never executed the way I should have, all while nursing a strained achilles.  Then in the early summer, an abysmal (albeit 1st place) performance in the Whirlie Alumni Run was followed up by a 2nd place finish in an 8k road race and a disappointing Ultimate Runner.

All said, sophomore year running was a roller coaster.  I was looking at the best season of my life, only to break my foot.  Then after that encouraging half-marathon finish, track left me unsatisfied.  Yet not all was lost.  Prior to the foot injury, I was in perhaps the best shape of my life.  With some solid summer training, I should be able to return to that point.  After only 4-weeks back, the success in the half-marathon might provide a hint that my greatest potential is in the half/full marathon distances.  And then, despite consistently poor execution in track and an accompanying injury, I manged to produce PRs in my two events.  All told, a down year saw me run PRs in the half-marathon, 8k, 4-mile, 5k, 1500m, and 800m.

Improvement, however small, is improvement, I reckon.  I'm going to take 2 weeks to rest and then it'll be time to gear up for cross country.  Can't wait to see what next year holds.