Our newest blogger is Will Janakis formerly of Marshwood and presently a junior at Thomas College. Janakis fnished 15th in the North Atlantic conference championship last year running 29:02. Follow Will in his junior xc season for Thomas College.
Well folks, the second week of my season and the first race have now been completed. My week started off real well. We did a twenty minute tempo run Monday and I was feeling good! The first two miles were extremely hilly, and I ran a 6:23 mile followed by a 6:10 after this it flattened out and I ran a 5:44 then ran the last .38 at 5:26 pace(I ended up covering 3.38 in the 20 minutes). I felt extremely good during the whole run: I was real relaxed my breathing was easy, the pace felt easy and I thought I could have kept it up another 10-15 minutes if need be. Afterwards I ran two miles around the old soccer fields and did 6 long strides. The problem in my week came Tuesday. I guess I was feeling a little too good and did my easy 8.5 in 61 min on a hilly loop which was probably a bit too fast. All while committing the most armature move in running: I over ran my sneakers!! It’s always tough when you’ve been running in a pair of shoes for a while to finally recognize its time to throw them under the bed for good. I’ve been running in some Saucony fast twitches since May and they were torn through all over. (I had already purchased some Nike 5.0s but I was reluctant to give up my trust worthy Saucony’s.) The lack of support in my mutilated shoes caused me to put a lot of stress on my right ankle making my Wednesday and Thursday runs miserable and super stiff. (Hour run Wednesday, half hour Thursday.) But luckily Pat the trainer let me take the coldest ice bath of my life Thursday!
Going into Friday’s race I felt a little stiff and sore but I paid no attention to that I was super excited for the first race of the season, and I hate to pay any attention to things like that on race day. Me and the whole team where pretty fired up despite finishing 6th last year and showing we’re really improving, we were voted 7th in the preseason coaches’ poll. Two of the teams voted in front of us hadn’t even beaten us once last year. So we were racing to prove a point. The NEC course isn’t the hardest or the fastest course in the world there’s a couple smaller hills and some windy trails nothing to tough or easy. I thought based on my workouts that I could run mid 17s. I started off right at the front feeling real good. About four minutes into the race though I felt my quads start to really tighten up this has never happened to me in a race before. I don’t know if the mental of physical effect were worse. In reality it probably only slowed me down a little bit, but it’s always hard to cope with something in a race when you face it for the first time. Other than that I ran a pretty steady pace the whole race and ran 18:06. Which isn’t terrible considering strides and two tempo runs are my only speed workouts in the last 10 months!
In the end our team placed 4th out of 11 scoring, we beat every team from our conference that was there including the ones voted 2nd 3rd 4th and 6th. We were all super excited we had never beaten Colby sawyer before and we edged them by 2 points! It was also are number 4,5,6 runners first ever cross country race!
I ended up taking Saturday off because my legs where still a bit stiff and sore from my bad shoe choice. Sunday I went up to Jackman, Maine to Dylan, our number four guy right now’s house and ran twelve amazingly hilly miles on the logging roads!
Me and the Thomas XC team will be back in action next week in Bangor at Hussons course (saxtel park?). We should have our team mom photographer (Debi Collins) So I may actually have some pictures in next week’s blog!