Drake Relays - 1500

I’m sitting on a plane heading home from the Drake Relays. It was a pretty important meet in that area, it has been going on for 101 years straight (that’s a long time).

Again, I’m pretty disappointed with my race, it was better than last week, but still not great. I felt ok going into the race. We arrived very late on Thursday night (actually it would have been Friday morning) and went to the track on Friday to do a pre-race 20-minute run and drills. Saturday was 1500-metre race day, my first 1500 in 2 years!  Since my races last week were suboptimal to say the least it’s hard to feel confident. For this race I was focusing on just racing, just trying and whatever happens, happens.

My tentative plan was to break up this long race in my mind. For the first 800 meters my goal was to stay in the pack and follow the pace. I didn’t allow myself to think about the whole distance, I was going to get to 800-metres and once I was at 600-metres I was going to give it all I could.

During the race my legs didn’t feel great but better compared to last week. This is a good sign, I think it was mostly due to a much needed quad massage and a good crack from the chiropractor. For warm-up I did some table stretching before my 15-minute run and then the usual drills/stretching. I think some light stretching before running helped me feel better while warming-up. My hips felt looser and this most definitely helped me feel more confident entering the race. This "feel better during warm-up" is relative to last week. I'll admit I did feel better and more efficient but a 4:25 1500 doesn't exactly prove my case.

Mentally this racing is very hard for me right now. I feel like I just don’t have that extra ooomph to race well yet. It’s my legs again; my hip flexors feel like over-stretched elastics. I believe that these days it just takes me awhile to get used to running at a faster pace but the hip flexor area is just so tight. My only saving grace is that I did feel like this at the beginning of indoors. One day something changed, I just snapped out of it and started to feel great again. That’s what I’m praying, a switch to flip and to just frekin’ snap out of it!

For now, I’m on the final leg travelling from Arizona to beautiful, lovely, fantastic Vancouver! At least there’s another race to redeem myself next week. Hopefully I will feel even better!