Spring Racing...

I haven't blogged much due to all my time being consumed by teaching and coaching. We have 2 weeks left of track season (Regionals & State) and my girls have been awesome this year! I have a great bunch and they have been running so well. My girls' 4x 800 team just took the gold medal at the district meet on Wednesday and I hope to see a lot of PR's this coming week:)

I decided with all this hard training we've been putting in, to do a couple shorter races of my own and see where I'm at. 2 Saturdays ago I ran Pat's Run which benefits the Pat Tillman Foundation. It is a 4.2 mile race that finished on the 42 yard line of Sun Devil Stadium (in honor of Pat's number, 42). I had done it 2 years ago and not only is it a great cause, it is also a HUGE deal out here. Over 19,000 people did the race this year. I had a great race and beat my previous time by 4 minutes. During the run, I looked at my Garmin (trusty GPS running watch) at the 5k point, and realized I had beaten my 5K PR during the 4.2 mile run. The next day I thought, "I need to run a 5k".
I found a small 5k downtown for May 2nd and signed up. I told the guy I coach with, since he was looking for a 5k as well. He told some of our runners who aren't running the Region Meet this week (JV runners) and they signed up as well. We met up this morning and had a great race. The guy I coach with won the whole thing, at about 15:30. Ridiculous. The boys did great too. They all finished in the top 20 and ran great times. I ran a great race and beat my PR by about a minute and 30 seconds. I did not use my watch, which sounds like nothing, but it was kind of a big deal for me. I didn't realize how much I look at it and rely on it to gauge my effort and pace. I ran the race mostly by myself (it was a small race and there were only 2 women in front of me...not really a "pack" to race with). I just tried to run what felt like "hard" to me.
It worked. Our little North Canyon group did well and we got lots of medals :) Onyx has become quite popular with the kids on my team. I bring her to practice whenever I can (which isn't that often, since I usually run the workouts with the kids...) but she comes to all my races with Keeper. She loves being included. She loves making friends with everyone (people and dogs). And she's just so freaking photogenic:)