I’m not a fast runner. In the grand scheme of things, there are runners who are faster than me and runners who are slower than me, but no one would ever look at my race times and go “wow, you are speedy.” In general, I’m fine with that.
Two years ago, I had a wonderful spring training season and PRed with two sub-2 hour half marathons. I was PRing at every distance and seeing high 8s as my average pace at a lot of races. Then I trained for a a marathon and while my overall pace slowed a bit, my endurance was wonderful. I ran a strong marathon, only missing my 4:30 goal by a few minutes. I managed to keep my endurance at the half marathon level and also PRed at the 5k distance, finally breaking 25 minutes and getting second in my age group.
And then it all fell apart. I think that 5k was where I initially tweaked my achilles. I ignored it for about 6 more weeks until it was absolutely injured. Since then I can’t seem to go more than a week or two without some part of my legs hurting. Sometimes it’s minor, sometimes (like my calf pain) it takes more to come back.
Today, I ran a really slow, hard, but pain free 3 miles. It wasn’t pretty (I know the 84% humidity played a role in that), but I got it done.
I have two weeks until my 10K race. I obviously won’t be aiming for a PR, but I’m really hoping not to be doing a 6 mile march…