My Soccer

The last few months I have been playing indoor and outdoor soccer typically once a week, but twice a week for the last couple weeks. I played soccer for probably 8 years when I was a kid, and I had not played for probably 10 years. It has been great getting back into and I am finally getting some ball skills back and feeling a little more confident out there.

I am always shocked by how bad of shape I am in when I try to do any other activity other than running. When I first started playing soccer, my legs and torso were sore for probably a week. it is amazing how your body adapts to whatever you typically do and sorta atrophies for everything else. I still get sore every week, but certainly a lot less. Soccer has also been cutting into my running time because of the time committment and the soreness. Long-term, it is probably better to mix up my activities. I was able to get my weekend 10 miler in today and it felt great getting on the road. It was probably 70 degrees and beautiful when i was running this morning. I was definitely not burning up the road out there, but a nice leisurely run.

I may not make too much progress towards my 20 min 5k until after the twice-a-week season is over, but who knows, maybe soccer will help my speed on the road.

My WC 5k #1

There is a summer 5k Series put on by the Chester County Running Store and the WC girls cross-country team. I have had a long term goal of breaking 20 minutes in a 5k, but haven't had a good 5k since April 2005, when I got a 20:24 at the clean air 5k. There are no marathons coming up for me this fall, so I am hoping this is the summer that 20 minutes falls. There are 7 races in the series, so I am hoping by number 7, i am a sub 20 5k-er.

There was some serious rain in the late afternoon, so I figured that the course would be a mess. But a quick warm-up before the race calmed those fears, because all the trails seemed quite runnable. Before the race, I learned from chatting with folks who had run the course before that the course was pretty hilly, which made me skeptical of this being the course to break 20 minutes. The race was maybe 80-100 people but people took the start pretty seriously. The course ended up being not as hilly as I expected, some rolling hills, but nothing ridiculous, and I felt pretty well paced the entire race. About halfway through my lungs started tightening up, which made me think back to my asthma attacks during soccer as a kid, but no attack every came. I missed all the mile markers, so I don't have any concrete results that I ran an even race, but it felt like I did, but I only passed/got passed by a couple people.

Overall, I finished in a somewhat disappointing 21:15 or so. Cutting 1:16 off a 5k time in two months may be a tough, but we will see. If I stick to my plan of intervals once a week, I think it can be done.

My Autism 10k

This past weekend I ran a 10k up in Chalfont, PA. The race was tiny (probably only about 60 people). One of the guys I work with was running it so i decided to as well. The day ended up being a warm and humid one. Nothing too exciting to report about the race. I started off way too fast with the first mile clocking in somewhere around 6:15. The 2nd through 4th miles went by without any hitches around my goal pace of 6:45. The fifth mile felt like a death march and I think the heat and humidity were getting to me. I was able to pick it up for the last 1.2 miles and finished up around 42:15 which is only a few seconds off of my PR, which is 42:11 at the Ben Franklin Bridge 10k. The great part of the race was that I won my age group and got a $10 gift certificate to dunkin donuts. The first edible prize I have ever won. sweet...

the other day I was reading an article about the government giving subsidies to companies that are refining coal into a liquid form that can be a replacement for foreign oil. While I am all for relieving our dependence on foreign oil, I guess I always hoped we could get away from producing greenhouse gases at the same time. I am not an expert on alternate fuel sources and I won't claim to be, but the interesting thing about the article was reading peoples responses to the article. There were a ton of people who said things like, "Global warming hasn't even been proven to be man made". Whether global warming is man made or not, it seems clear that global climate change my have catastrophic consequences... so no matter the reason for it, we should fight it as much as possible. Even if it is not man-made, wouldn't it be nice if we could reduce our carbon dioxide emissions and slow the process? seems logical...