Road Tripping

Took yesterday off, half out of necessity and half out of design.  Had a 5:00am pickup at the hotel in LA, flew to Indianapolis then caught a United flight home through Washington DC.  Got in just in time to go to softball pitching clinic with my daughter, finally got home at 7:30pm.  Long day without a minute of down time, so even if I had wanted to run I don’t know where or how I would have been able to get it done.  No problem skipping a day though, especially with the race this evening.

Leaving in a couple hours to drive to New York City.  The race tonight is part of a series of events held at the Armory called Thursday Night at the Races.  They are basically all-comers meets held after the dust settles on all the school practices that are held there in the afternoon.  The facility is world class, and holds meets of that caliber several times a year.  I’ve run there a couple times before, including the 4×800 relay we ran last year when our Greater Philadelphia TC team broke the 40-49 year old world record.  The track is fantastic, and the meet crowd is always fun.  The logistics of the meet are a little less than ideal, but I guess I’ve come to accept that as being the price you pay for living in central PA.  Going to leave early enough to take a break along the way and run for a couple minutes to stretch the legs out – 3.5 hours is a long time to sit before trying to compete.  I hope to then be there early enough to relax for a bit, then still have time to warm up.  Running at 8pm is probably not the best time for the body clock either, but you can just add that to the list.  It will hopefully be a fun event -I’ll see a couple buddies and hopefully run a decent time.  I’m not expecting to PR (but I’d certainly take it), but I’m not going all the way up there just to see if I remember how to make left-hand turns either.  Remembering last years 800m at this same event, my goal is to not defer to the college kids yet again, only to get slowed down and then put in a position where there is a lot of jockeying and no chance of a good time.  I hope to get out front and run a clean race – I don’t expect to run alone, but I also don’t hope to be duking it out for 3 of the 4 laps with a kid who eventually runs 2:03.  Time will tell….

Will hopefully update this tonight after the race, and if not I’ll do it tomorrow.  As I think I wrote before, I don’t see any more meets on the horizon prior to going out to the national meet in Albuquerque on March 5-6.  Like last weekend, I’d like to run a respectable time tonight despite the casual prep week – then, with time for a couple more weeks of training before nationals, hopefully I can bag a PR or two out west.  Haven’t researched the altitude factor yet, might be setting the bar a little high (no pun intended)…