Looking back

It's now been 9 days since the 100 miler on the Isle of Man.  I've made it home, gotten settled back into the routine of things, and had a chance to look back at how the trip went.  There's a lot of bitter/sweet about the trip, but I came away learning a lot and having a lot to be proud of.  And a lot of confusion about what the future holds.

One thing I'm quite proud of was training for both a 5,000 and a 100 mile race.  I thought that would be quite hard to do, but I think we probably couldn't have done too much better with how we prepared.  While I'm capable of going faster for a 5,000 and a 10K, with the hot conditions and everything else, I'm quite pleased with how we both did.  And while we didn't finish the 100milers, it wasn't for lack of training and with how the first part of the race went we were on track to finish. 

As our aid station helper James pointed out, there was a lot we did right during the 100 miler.  We were super consistent at the beginning of the race.  he said he was literally setting his watch for how long it was taking us to do the loop.  We found our pace and we were sticking to it, even though I was holding myself back a lot (that's the drawback of being a race walker...).  Our eating was spot on.  We never had stomach issues and I never felt hungry, so all the food practicing was really helpful and seemed to work.  While I did stop, I never gave up.  Even when I did some miles close to 25 minutes, I was still thinking if I could just get my legs to loosen up I could still pick it up and make it.   In hindsight I probably did about 4 miles too far.  Yesterday was the first day post race that I didn't feel pain every step I took or pain when standing.  We're finally getting some of the muscles in my leg to relax and that's helping a lot.  I'm thinking of going for a short, easy RW today to see how that feels.  Fingers crossed!

But now I am left feeling a little adrift.  I'm not exactly sure where to go from here.  I wanted to focus on some endurance events for a while, but now I'm not so sure.  I'd love to focus on 20K, since it's coming up to an Olympic year, but I've had some frustration with 20K lately.   So more thought will have to go into what is coming up next.  I've got the 40K September 13th, and then the four day race in China at the end of the month, so I need to get going for those.  But after that, who knows?