Weekend Recap

Well, it certainly was an eventful weekend! I guess I'll start by recapping the race.

The night before I couldn't sleep much at all. I shouldn't have been surprised by that, but I was. Perhaps the 18 year gap between my last race and my upcoming one had something to do with that? Anyway, so that morning rolls around and Laura and I get ready to head out. After some last words of encouragement to each other we got in the car with Jen and Noel and headed north to the race.

To keep my mind off of things I had worked out a surprise with our friend and sometime training partner Heather: she was going to drive down and cheer us on. I knew that Laura would appreciate this, so we worked it out so that she would meet us a few minutes before the start. Needless to say, Laura was very happy with this little surprise!

Once the race starts, I turn my music on and get into the zone. It feels at once foreign and very familiar. I raced a LOT when I was a kid, so I'm used to the feeling of a race...the pre-race jitters, the nervous energy, etc. But I was 18 years younger the last time I raced - my body really hadn't encountered too many problems like the one I have now has.

A mile in I'm feeling pretty good. I had just ran a 9:33 mile, which was well under what I had been running in training and would easily let me hit my goal time. Then the hills hit. They were minor, but they certainly slowed me down a bit.

At about the 1.5 mile mark, I get a cramp in my side. Okay, this I know how to handle from way back. Slow the pace a bit, grab some water, and regulate my breathing to get it to go away. Thankfully all those years of training make it vanish in a minute or two, but I lose some speed.

At 2.5 miles my calves are feeling like jelly...there's not a whole lot left in the tank, but I continue to push on knowing that the finish is about five minutes away.

At the 3 mile mark I've actually upped my pace a bit to try to push through the last leg of the race...I emerge from the woods expecting about 500 feet left. Nope. There's still about .2 miles left. What?? As I'm at the edge of what I've got left, I just try to keep it up. Jen passes me right before the finish and I get a gun time of 34:06.

My goal for 3.1 miles was under 30 minutes which, according to the timer, I've missed by a ton. My running app tells me I've run almost 3.4 miles, and while they aren't perfect it seems closer to the truth. I'm pissed, but I take off my bib and run back out to find Laura and get her in to the finish.

Laura finishes really strong and now we have the long wait while Noel finishes her half. While we're chatting, we all start talking about how it felt longer than 3.1 and how our GPS apps all tell us it was closer to 3.4. When Laura checks her "official" time, she's pissed: nine seconds over her goal time. The nicest part was that even the 5K runners got a beautiful hand-blown glass medal.

An hour and change later Noel finishes strong and we all celebrate a race well run! But, of course, I can't let the distance anomaly go. So on Sunday, when Laura and I get home, I pull up the computer and map it out. What do I find? 3.33 miles. So Laura DID beat her goal time and I was much closer to mine. I think I was at 31:30 or so at 3.1 which is much better than what I finished at.

Now that I've solved The Mystery of the Longer 5K, it's time to watch some football!! We made it to Don & Robyn's about midway through the second quarter of the Pats game. It was a see-saw back and forth battle and the Patriots didn't look all that strong against a Bills team they should have crushed. In the end they wound up kicking a field goal to win it with five seconds left.

The good news for the Pats is that Brady and new wideout Danny Amendola seemed to be pretty well in sync. The bad news is that their o-line was soft and the defense needed a bit of work. They lost a lot of weapons on that offense and will need to work hard to make up for those players.

Next up? The 49ers and the Packers from Candlestick Park in San Fran. Wow. What a game. Obviously I was a bit more wound up for this one, but it lived up to the hype. The Niners and the Pack used to have a bitter rivalry 10 or 15 years ago, but it got swept under the rug when the Niners sucked. The matchups didn't really have the tension that they used to. Well, this one fixed all of that.

In the days leading up to the game Clay Matthews was mentioning how the new rule changes were going to allow the Packer's defense to hit Colin Kaepernick when he was running the option like he was a running back. Basically, he was saying that they were going to hit him hard and get him scared.

How did Kap react to this? He stayed in the pocket a lot and threw for 412 yards and 3 touchdowns. I guess that makes him a dual-threat! The game got chippy at one point when Clay Matthews made a late hit on Kap when he was out of bounds and all hell broke loose for a minute. The Niners held the lead until the 4th quarter when the Packers took it from them, but they were able to drive down the field for another score and finish it off with a field goal to seal the deal.

Some good takeaways here for the Niners were the play of both Kaepernick and new receiver Anquan Boldin. Boldin caught 13 passes for 208 yards and a touchdown, which goes a long way towards filling the void left by the injured Michael Crabtree. Vernon Davis was also a key factor for the Niners, which speaks volumes about the chemistry the young quarterback has developed with his receiving corps.

The defense, at least the d-line, was very solid as usual. I would like to see some work done in the secondary. There was some missed tackles and blown coverage that led to the Packers scoring more than one touchdown. But, it's early and there's a lot of football left to be played!