Start time: 5/4/03, 9:30am
Location: Downtown Washington DC
Activity: Running
Distance: 3.1 miles
Run:Walk ratio: 3:2
Average pace: 13:10min/mile

Lesse. In the last update, I mentioned going running Wednesday morning. Well, I must have done something wrong then because I had an achy left calf for Wednesday evening, Thursday, and Friday. (On Thursday night my friend Steve even commented on me limping, which I hadn’t conciously been doing.) When I woke up Saturday morning, my calf was still hurting. Unfortunately, I’d already promised Martha and Kimberly that I’d do the MayDay 5K with them and Julie; it benefits a paralysis foundation, one of the recipients being a friend of theirs who was hit by a car while training for AIDSRide and is now wheelchair bound for life. I felt really, really bad about not not doing this, but the idea of hurting my calf more kept guilt from pushing me into doing it. (I’ve learned the hard way to not run on an injury.)

However, by Saturday evening it was feeling completely normal, so I ended up running in the Brain Tumor Society 5K with the ladies this morning instead. (Julie’s sister is a brain tumor survivor, so it meant a lot for her to have others come.) The run itself went really well—I was hoping for an under-40 minutes time and tried to hustle a bit in the last quarter mile to hit that mark (leaving the others behind—sorry about that!) but by my watch missed it by about 50 seconds. Oh well. My overall pace was still pretty good and I’m not complaining! Nice crisp, cool weather helped it being a pretty enjoyable experience.