Week in Review: 4-10 March, and Spectating

The running that I did:

4 March: 10-ish miles pre- and during the B&A "Trail" Marathon with Meg H, then 8-ish more miles afterwards, for some reason (130 minutes).

5 March: 15 miles to, during, and from the Fed Hill Monday Night (Race) Run, with some stupid-fast stuff somewhere in the middle (105 minutes).

6 March: 8 miles at lunch (60 minutes), track "workout" - 15 min warmup, 5x(800m, 2 min rest, 400m, 90 sec rest), 15 minute warmdown. Intervals in (2:51, 76), (3:00+, 80-ish), (3:00+, 80-ish), (3:00+, 80-ish), (3:00+, 80-ish) . . . yeah, oops, I had only one good set in me.

7 March: 10 miles at lunch (70 minutes), 10 more miles later, in part with the Wednesday Night O'Donnell Square Run group (70 minutes).

8 March: 4-ish miles with Luke after work (27 minutes), 23-ish miles with Meg H on the dark scary hilly Catonsville loop, ending just before midnight (190 minutes).

9 March: 10 sort of lazy miles (70 minutes) in the afternoon.

10 March: 10-ish miles with Luke at Loch Raven (70 minutes).

Total Time: 852 minutes
Total distance: 116 miles

The running that I watched:

While this week was not my biggest-ever week in terms of mileage, it was my biggest-ever week in terms of watching people run. I had the pleasure of watching both the B&A "Trail" (i.e. asphalt path to Marley Station Mall) Marathon last Sunday, and the Shamrock 5K in downtown Baltimore yesterday. Typically, I am a pretty bad running spectator, because I'm almost always game for anything running-related, no matter how stupid or out of my comfort zone. But in both cases, I was too late to the registration party to get in on either, so I was relegated to the sidelines.

In both cases, though, I'm glad that I had the opportunity to be on the sidelines. Running is generally a very self-focused, self-directed activity. With all of the racing that I've been doing lately, it was a nice mental break to shift that focus, and support other runners for a change. There's also a lot to be said for what you can learn from watching others run, from the stoic, steady strides in the middle-mile wasteland of a marathon, to the all-out finishing kicks in a 5K. Lots of great efforts to be filed away in the memory banks for instruction and inspiration in my upcoming races . . . and some of them captured on my cell-phone camera, which turned out to be a lot of fun, and something that I want to do more of in the future (maybe with a better camera, although there is a certain charm to trying to take a good picture with a less-than-good camera).

And all of that "outward focus," if you will, is, in a more general sense, something that I needed, considering the sort of emotional turmoil that's driven me a bit more inward than is really healthy in the long-term over the past few weeks. Between the warm, sunny Sunday afternoons, the neon-yellow Falls Road Racing jerseys, and the return of Daylight Savings Time, I've been fortunate to find plenty of light to combat the recent darkness in my life. So congratulations and thank you to everybody who I was able to watch racing the past two Sundays. The future is very bright indeed.


Shamrock 5K - my best crummy cell phone picture (Becky Parks flying down Pratt Street)