Running with the Daums: Two Whirlwind Weekends of Races

What the heck have we been up to lately? It’s hard for me to even keep track of it all. Last weekend, Chass, Emily and I headed down to Houston along with our friend David Fuentes to race the confusingly named USA 10 Miler (it stands for United Space Alliance). I think that was a bit of a wake up call for all of us. Not that any of us ran terribly - Chass was 3rd in 52:44, I was 5th in 54:15, and Emily was 1st in 60:48. I suppose it just wasn’t up to expectations of where we thought we’d be. Sure, conditions weren’t great, a little humid and a little windy, but it’s easy to make excuses and difficult to take a cold hard look at what you’ve been doing and what you could do better.

So if last weekend was a time for reevaluating, this weekend was a time for (mostly) celebrating great workouts and races (Emily’s been a little under the weather this week). First Em and I headed south to a small local race by the river to watch Amy and Rob race - for Rob, this was the first race he’s done since February, when he was knocked out with a fracture in the navicular bone of his foot, an injury that is sometimes career ending. Amy won handily with a time of 16:58, and Rob ran strong for 2nd to a good local guy, beating his time in the time trial we did last week handily (16:19 compared to 16:47 last Monday).

After the race, I got to talk to Chass, who had just done a workout of 4 by 2 miles with 3:00 jog recoveries. Last year Chass did a very similar workout in an average of 10:02 per 2 mile, 8 days before running 51:18 for a 10 mile race. This year he averaged 9:54 per repeat, which just sounds ridiculous to me - I’d be hard pressed to do 2 of those in a race-type situation.

Then today I averaged just a hair under 6:00 per mile for 24 miles. Certainly not the fastest workout I’ve ever done, but it’s up there for longest, and it was good to get this one out of the way. The end of the season is rapidly approaching, and it’s good to feel like I’m gaining momentum, rather than losing it.

But unfortunately it’s now time for the mowing of the lawn, before the wife and I get down to business cooking up some borracho beans. They speed up recovery from long workouts by at least a day, and that is a scientific fact*. I leave you with pictures and videos!

*This is almost certainly not true.