Team Clatterbuck

The weekend was great!
First up was the Manna DC 5k race Saturday morning. I had been concentrating on breathing, cadence, and form for most of the race, but when I saw the finish line I decided to really push it.
As you can see I slipped into really bad form – classic heel-striking. The good news is that I beat last year’s time for the same race by a minute and a half. The official results haven’t been posted yet, and it wasn’t a chip race, but my time was 25:53. Not too bad for a race with a long windy hill climb in the last mile.
Saturday evening Bill, Jon and I went to see Kathleen Edwards at the Ram’s Head Tavern in Annapolis. She was really good, and has a beautiful voice, but the opening act, Joel Plaskett, really stole the show.
Sunday Jon and I did our first bike ride of the season. I got to test out the new bike computer – the Garmin Edge 305 with cadence and heart rate monitor.
The results can be seen here and here. I recorded the two loops as separate tracks to compare them individually. It’s awesome to be able to see all the data after the workout. I really love the bright display and being able to watch the cadence and heart rate during the ride.

Results from the 2006 Shamrock 5k are here.

My time – 25:15 and placed 129/449 for my age group and 645/2890 overall.
I kept a very even pace, and concentrated on my form, cadence and breathing, and I’m really happy with how I ran it. Of course it’s a very fast course to begin with, but I did beat last year’s time on the same course by a minute and a half.
Next up is the manna 5k in DC on March 25th. It’s an out and back course with a fairly steep downhill at the beginning, which turns into a fairly steep uphill at the end. It’s a much smaller race and a lot of fun.

Less than a week til the Shamrock 5k !!

Here’s the runs I have coming up. I can’t really call them races – I treat them like large organized group runs.

3/12 – Shamrock 5k
3/25 – Manna DC 5k
4/8 – Visionary Peace 5k Night Run
4/15 – National Race to Stop the Silence 8K run (Bill is doing the 5k with me)
4/23 – Believe in Tomorrow’s Port to Fort 6k
5/7 – Governor’s Bay Bridge 10k

Depending on weather I plan to start alternating bike rides on the non-group-run weekends.
This should be a fun Spring.

Getting back into running is going slower than I expected. Last year I was recovering from knee surgery but by this time I was already up to more mileage than I am now. I’m taking it a little easier to try to prevent the ITB problems that plagued me after the half marathon last year. Slow and steady wins the race. Well not actually – the fastest runner wins the race, but metaphorically speaking slow and steady is generally the winning combination.
We had a foot of snow this past weekend, so I caught up on some DVDs I had been meaning to watch and was quite pleasantly surprised by Butterfly Effect. Admittedly I had low expectaions, but it was a pretty good movie.
Later this month Night Watch will be playing at a couple of the local independant cinemas. I hope it does well enough that they bring the rest of the trilogy over.
Less than 4 weeks until the Shamrock 5k race. I really want to beat my last year’s time so I’ve got a lot of work to do before then. Looks like we need a montage. “Even Rocky had a montage!”