Inter Alia

Yes your honor, of my own free will I did run the Law Week 8k race today. The act was conditio sine qua non of great pleasure partaken. Prima facie, your honor, I did run faster than perhaps was wise given my bodily condition. A close examination of the facts will show that it was actually slow by the standards set by my running over the past year. I throw myself on the mercy of the court and hope I am not sentenced to additional time in injury jail. The verdict will be handed down Sunday or Monday.

I do like the Law Week 8k. It is was the first race I ever ran for time.....in April 2005. So it was the start of all this madness for me.

And it felt so good to be running there today. I loved it. Soaking up the atmosphere prior to the race. Hanging around the BARC tent. Talking to friends. Running a comfortable to comfortably hard race on the dreaded Allen Parkway. Having an Amstel Light before 9 am. Icing my leg and foot at the end of the race. Picking up my nifty HARRA members marathon finishers towel. Pure joy.

I had planned to keep to 9 minute miles. I had planned to keep my heart rate in a training mode and wore my monitor for the first time ever in a race. I went faster than plan. I was running real comfortably at 8:45 pace for the first three miles, but my heart rate was high. My running fitness is down a lot compared with the fall. I guess the only way to keep running fitness is to run.

Then again it was pretty humid, which really hammers my HR. Everyone seemed to be slower than last year. The last mile I picked it up, habit I guess. I finished with a chip time under 43 minutes, at an 8:37 average pace I believe. I never really raced, it was more like a tempo run until the end, probably a 80% effort over the first half and 90% over the last half. Nevertheless, the humidity and my lack of running mileage lately would not have let me run much faster.

It was interesting to see my HR in the mid to upper 180's during the final 400 yards. I'm revising my estimate of my max HR to 190.