Track Training & 5K Test Run

Time: 6pm, approx. 1 1/2 hours

• 1600 warm up
• 3 laps strides
• stretch
• 5K - Leadbetter beach to Doubletree round trip
  

Meal: 1/2 a Cliff bar at 5:30pm

I'm so excited after tonight - I improved my 5K speed by almost 5 minutes from last year! I came in at 26:48, which was 12 seconds faster than my goal for the evening. That felt great, and even offset the extreme hunger I felt while running the 5K. :-)

I really tried to eat the entire Cliff bar...I really did...but I just couldn't muscle it down. My appetite has reduced over the past month or so, and I definitely find that I can't eat Cliff or any other type of energy bars if I am not hungry (they just do not taste good to me - consider it the equivalent of drinking cough medicine...my mom knows just how bad that is for me). Anyway, I am curious as to whether my time would have been even better if I had eaten a bit more. This is something I think I can experiment with during Nite Moves, the summer weekly 5K in Santa Barbara that starts on April 25 this year.

Besides feeling a bit famished and my knees being slightly uncomfortable I did pretty well. The foam roller I got from Dr. Nicole is definitely helping. While there is still some soreness, I can definitely feel that it isn't as tight (if that even makes sense).

On that note, did I mention that I saw my doctor for a physical on Monday? I told her about my knees because I felt like I should, and my feeling is that she blew it way out of proportion. She said she wasn't excited about me continuing my training if my knees were hurting, and put in a referral for an orthopedic doctor. She ordered some x-rays, and even the x-ray tech said that he had problems with his knees when he first started running, too, and suggested just getting a new pair of shoes. Anyway, I'm frustrated because I don't think she knows much about sports medicine and, of course, wasn't very responsive to the fact that I've already been talking to Dr. Nicole about it. My experience is that doctors can sometimes be too quick to try and alleviate this sort of thing - and I don't feel like there's anything wrong with continuing the Physical Therapy (foam roller, stretching), buying new shoes, improving my run posture, and going from there. I think I'll skip the Ortho for now...