Analysis of the Jimmy D 5k

This was my first race since June 7th and I have only done 2 workouts all summer. I ran 19:33–good enough for 3rd place. I can’t complain because I’ve had a good summer of training and a lot of support from my family, friends & teammates when it came to my intense commitment to training this summer. So I won’t complain. Instead I’m going to analyze why I am so disappointed with myself and with how this race went.

I made a series of stupid mistakes & decisions.
1. I wore new racing flats. Brand new, never been worn, straight out of the box racing flats. I’ve never so much as ran a stride in them.
2. I overslept
3. Then I was late to the race because I overslept. Unless I am over an hour early that is late by my standards.
4. Because I was late I barely warmed up
5. I didn’t stretch out at all which is a horrible choice for a person who has posterior compartment syndrome and a foot with nerve damage that swells on the regular
6. I opted to wear my standard jersey instead of the crop top version of my jersey. The jersey makes me extremely hot and the humidity was out of control today.
7. My first mile was around 5:40–too fast for the first race of the summer.
8. Half way through the race I thought of the full Gatorade bottle in my car that I decided not to even sip from before racing and the water bottle that I didn’t refill before I left the house. Obviously, I was thirsty at the half way point and pretty mad at myself.
9. I then remembered this race is downhill and then goes back up the hill at the turn around. I hadn’t remembered that and didn’t actually notice it until my feet went numb and my calves tightened up and I began having issues. I’ve been running with compartment syndrome for years and I’m use to this but clearly this happened to me today because I wasn’t precautions at all. I also let it slow me down drastically in the last mile instead of pushing through it.
10. I let another woman pass me in the last mile and I didn’t respond to it.

^these are also excuses^
They are things that actually happened but they are all my fault. When it comes down to it I did not try as hard as I could. I did not prepare myself for this race adequately. I gave up on myself at the end. I let myself down and now I am disappointed.

I’m not necessarily disappointed by how I raced. Im disappointed because I have been full of doubt all week. It’s been a mentally exhausting week for me and I’ve been struggling to keep myself positive and focused. When I’ve gotten home the past few days I’ve been so drained and most of my runs have been short and of poor quality. I somehow still managed to run 42.5 miles but I feel like the fact that I couldn’t run what I had set out to run has been weighing heavily on my mind. I know that running less this week has no actual effect on how I raced today but I also know it broke my confidence a little bit. It’s so difficult to keep control of every aspect of your life at all times and running helps me stay balanced and allows me to feel in control of something. I should have fought harder this week to free myself of doubt and to keep my confidence in tact. I should have fought to stay in control of my runs. I let the doubt win this week because I am not capable of being strong every second of every moment of everyday but the majority of the time I am stronger than I’ve ever been and that is a victory. We all have moments of doubt and fear and we all have our own personal struggles. It’s not the excuses I listed above that caused me to be disappointed with my race today, it’s not even the fact that my training slipped a little bit this week, it is simply the fact that I was struggling to be mentally strong. It happens. All I can do now is move forward.

If I ran 19:33 feeling weak I wonder what I will run when I feel strong…..