Olympic Wow’s, tri #2 and New Shoes :)

Well runners, I hope everyone’s been watching the Olympics — especially the track and field events — because they have been truly amazing.

Saturday night my sister and I caught the women’s marathon. Simply amazing! I’ve always been a big fan of Paula Radcliffe; besides being one of the greatest female distance runners in the world, she’s such a humble and cheery person. But, like Athens four years ago, she didn’t come close to placing this weekend. Instead, Romania’s Constantina Tomescu killed the race, finishing a good 20 seconds in front of silver medalist Catherine Ndereba of Kenya.

Watching them run mile after mile at sub 5:30 minute pace was simply amazing. The best flat out ONE mile time I have ever run was 5:28 minutes. That was only one mile; these women did 26.1 of them at roughly that speed. Incredible!

Moving on to the other track and field event that really impressed me — the men’s 100m sprint. Usain “Lightning” Bolt. Need I say more? The boy (literally still a boy at 21 years old) looked like he was jogging as he broke the world record at 9.69 seconds. Even though I don’t really like watching sprints (they’re over so damn fast), I certainly marveled at that race.

On another note: my sister completed her second triathlon yesterday in Luray, VA. This time she opted for the sprint distance and really improved her performance by a lot. This course required participants to jog up about two-three flights of slippery steps on the way out of the lake on the way to the transition area. Thinking I could warn Jess about the slippery steps, I was yelling, “Jess, don’t slip!!” while snapping pics of her. Of course as soon as she heard me shouting about halfway up the steps, she started slipping. Oops. At least she was smiling about it 🙂

she just murdered the bike portion, moving up more than a few spots. And she had so much left after the run that she sprinted in, allowing for only one quick snap of the back of her legs. Afterwards, she admitted that she prefers the sprint distance to the Olympic distance but is still going to train for the longer course for future races.

Next point of discussion: I got new running shoes on Saturday and was able to cut three minutes off my 8 mile time 🙂 It had been super foolish of me to keep running on such old shoes, but I’ve been broke as a joke for the past few months. It finally got to the point where my ankles and knees were fighting me, and so I broke down and took a trip to the shoe store 😦

Lastly but certainly not least(ly): The Press Club 5K is coming up. Vocus is apparently sponsoring us. I think so far we’ve got Shep, Cari and myself already signed up. Unfortunately the race is on a Saturday, meaning CS2 will not be able to attend.

The Baltimore half marathon and marathon (and 5K) registrations are still open for anyone who’s still interested 🙂 I think that’s all I had to discuss from the weekend. I hope everyone’s doing well! How’s the running coming along?

Peace out!