Lessons learned and disappointment

soooo...where to start....I came back from Colorado very well rested and kind of complacent about racing in Chattanooga....not a good thing.....When I first signed up I was really looking forward to going there to race but as the race grew closer, I was kind of having second thoughts about it...and, as I learned in Ouachita, I am a very mental runner, and if I am not all there mentally for a race, I do not fare well....I tried my hardest to get myself psyched for the race but even on the car ride to Chat I was having a hard time convincing myself that I wanted to race....

I arrived in Chattanooga Thursday evening and crashed at our Patagonia rep, Matt, and his wife Natalie's house in a very cool neighborhood on the North side of the river...the race was originally supposed to start at 7 am on Friday, which I though was a bit late considering the heat, but the RD changed the time to 8 am....by 8 am...it was freaking hot....

felt pretty good leading up to the race and lined up with about 16 or 17 other people for the start...we took off and I went out pretty hard holding steady in 5th place for about the first ten miles or so...then all of the sudden everything went downhill....I began to feel an extremely intense pain that was familiar from last fall...it was my IT band and it was causing my right knee to hurt really bad...i slowed down considerably and then it got to the point where I could hardly run at all anymore...I ran when I could and walked when I couldn't....I was never going more than about 100 yards running before I would stop to walk for a minute....the trail was pretty intense as far as rocky footing and elevation change goes and all that together was wreaking havoc on my knee....at his point I was incredibly frustrated and I was not having a good time at all....I kept on with the run\walk until I finished the 22 miles in 4:40....I was extremely angry at the whole situation and I was definitely in pain following the race...

After stretching out really good and icing on and off and Matt's house, I began to feel somewhat better, but I was still really worried about my IT band flaring up again at Saturday's race...woke up Saturday feeling pretty decent and my plan was to just take it easy so that I would maybe be able to get on it pretty hard on Sunday....race began and I took off towards the back of the pack and cruised for about the first 7 miles or so....then all of the sudden, boom! my knee was killing me again....now I was even more frustrated, knowing that I was going to have to slog for another 11 miles....the trail was tamer than Friday's so I was able to kind of push through some of the knee pain and run the flatter sections of the course but I hated every minute of it....finished pretty close to last somewhere around 3:40.....

At this point it was decision time for me....I had given myself an easy day to see how my knee held up and obviously it was not good.....therefore rather than continue to hurt myself and hate every minute of my race on Sunday, I just called it a weekend.....looking back on it now I definitely don't regret my decision...I am still feeling my knee today and I think it's better to just take some time off and completely recover before I get on it hard for Stumpjump....

all in all, I did come away from the weekend having learned some important lessons....first off, I was consistently running decently high mileage in teh weeks leading up to the race...while in Colorado I didn't run too much but I stayed loose, however the week leading up to the race I didn't run at all....I think going from no runs in 11 or 12 days to a 22 miler at race pace kicked my ass...that is completely my fault and I should not have let that happen....

secondly, I know that I have to be more focused in order to do well...being consistent in my training helps me keep my focus and my Colorado trip kind of threw off my consistency, in turn allowing me to loose my focus....

I don't think this weekend was a total waste, as I did still bag some mileage and learned some very important lessons about my running, and now I am definitely focused on redemption at Stumpjump!

I will be taking at least the next week, possibly two weeks off running to completely get my knee and the bottoms of my feet back to normal so that I can start building up for Stumpjump....until next time....