DC Weekend

It was a fun, albeit wet, weekend up in DC. I had never been there (I'm not counting the time I was up there with my family when I was 3 or 4 because I don't remember a thing) and our host Kathy showed us a lot of the sites. We were planning on hitting more of them on Sunday but the weather just wasn't in our favor. We'll just have to head back up there another time.

Saturday morning she let me ride her computrainer which was really, really nice. So much nicer than my bike trainer (but so much more expensive!) Marty got a swim in her endless pool that's in the garage. After our morning workouts we took the Metro into downtown. She lives a short walk away from one of the stops - I LOVE good public transportation! If I lived in a city like that, I would totally forego the house and yard to get the convenience of riding into the city. I also learned about slugging - I had never heard that term before. Very interesting.

First stop was lunch at a tapas restaurant then we walked to the Washington Monument (and went up to the top), WWII Memorial, Vietnam Memorial, Korean War Memorial, Lincoln Memorial and then we crossed the Potomac to Arlington National Cemetary and saw the eternal flame for JFK. It was A LOT of walking (~ 5miles?) and it pretty much rained the entire time. We were all very wet and very exhausted when we finally got to dinner.

Once we got home we all pretty much went right to bed since the time was going to leave us 1 hour short on sleep and we were doing the Shamrock 8K in downtown the next morning.

We caught the Metro in the morning for the race - so nice to not have to worry about parking and get dropped off right near the start! Marty and I had just enough time to hit the port-o-potties before lining up. No warmup which I didn't care at all about and thankfully the rain stopped for the race!! We were so lucky because not too long afterwards it started back up again.

The streets were all closed down and we started heading right for the Capitol. That was very, very neat and it kind of felt like we were in a movie. We ran by some famous stuff but since the buildings didn't all have the greatest signs, I wasn't quite sure what everything was. I did look around a lot trying to take in the sights. There were a little over 4,000 people in the race, which was apparently smaller than normal because of the weather.

I felt all right during the race. As I've mentioned before, my training hasn't been going so well and my hip is not doing too hot. It tightened up about halfway through - not to the point where I felt like I need to stop or anything, but where I felt like I couldn't push any harder. I'm kind of at an impasse - I know with how it's feeling I'm not going to be able to do the hard workouts I need to be doing right now. I can still run but it probably needs some downtime and serious strengthening work, but races loom in the not so distant future. What to do, what to do.

Anyways, results say I averaged 6:40 pace - heh, not bad. I felt fine physically other than the hip. It's interesting that my Garmin clocked the distance at 5.1 - someone who puts on a race recently told us that when certifying a course, they have to take the shortest line possible on all turns, even if that is not how the course is set up. That's a pretty weird way to mark a course, and with all the turns and u-turns the extra distance makes sense. So maybe I ran a bit faster. Double heh, not bad. Marty ran really well - his run training is so much better than it's been the past couple of years and he's sneaking in all sorts of extra mileage with his morning Tassie runs.

Next weekend - finally I'm staying at home! Marty isn't as he's meeting his dad in Atlantic City for some Father-Son time.