Mike Garrison

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Always striving to push my limits and see how good my best is.

Mike Garrison

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Thursday, July 30, 2009

Limited Success

My goal was simple for the TNT 5k Tuesday night. Run well enough to not embarrass myself and incur the ridicule of my "friends" and teammates. I'm not a runner per se, so I didn't think it would be too hard to do that. I feel like I actually ran a pretty respectable race and my legs didn't bother me near as much as I anticipated.

Mission accomplished.

Right?

Wrong.

This photo was circulated as part of a friendly caption contest. ------>

I'm not sure if I'm more disappointed that someone makes a shirt that zips down that much in the front, that I chose to wear a shirt that zips down that much in the front, or that I actually zipped it down that much in the front. Plenty of disappointment to go around I suppose. (Pass the gold chains!)

And seriously, does that look like the face of someone having a good time? I apparently spent more time as a child focusing on the "agony of defeat" images than I did the ones for the "thrill of victory".

Despite my failure of avoiding ridicule I did have a great time. It seemed like the nearly 100 other runners had a blast as well. The course was hilly and almost all on wooded trails and the weather managed to hold off for us. Since the course was two laps and wound throughout Horizon's wooded property you had plenty of opportunities to attempt to acknowledge other runners without sacrificing too much oxygen and falling on your face.

I also learned that I have no prayer in keeping pace with real runners on flats and downhills, but I do actually have a fighting chance on the uphills. This was the hilliest race in the series, so I fully expect my performance relative to the field to only go downhill (no pun intended, seriously, I didn't see this until doing my last spelling/grammar check) from here.

Speaking of the series, the next race is in two weeks so go sign up!

I'm going to go practice smiling...

posted by Garrison at 1:00 PM 0 Comments

Monday, July 27, 2009

Whoops

After my last AR in the middle of May I took about a month off from any real training. We were getting ready for PA, and I was pretty beat from a lot of racing in the spring, (A lot by my standards anyways.) so it seemed like good timing.

After PA I started getting back into training, primarily on my road bike, (and I was having a lot of fun with it.) I was riding frequently, and pretty hard, so I didn't spend much (any) time running.

Due to recent unfortunate circumstances (that I'll get into shortly, as in, it's earned it's own post that I haven't quite finished yet) I've been unable to ride my road bike the past 9 or 10 days.

So, I've taken the opportunity to get in more running. I've managed to get in 20+ miles in 5 days. I ran 6 miles both Saturday and Sunday. Now I know for actual runners (which I will never claim to be) that's not a lot but it's come as quite a shock to my system.

Mostly my legs.

I'm sore. Like, surprisingly sore.

Which is where the whoops comes in.

I've got my first 5k since 2001 coming up. And by coming up, I mean tomorrow. I'm running the PA TNT race at Horizon, and although I never had any aspirations of doing anything impressive, I would prefer not to embarass myself.

Seeing as how the focus of most of my racing is endurance for events for events 24 hours long I don't spend a lot of time working on my "top end". Still, it might have been wise to look at my calendar and not done the crash course in footwork the last few days.

So, short of some kind of recovery miracle, meeting that modest goal of embarassment avoidance might be kind of tough.

Whoops.

Oh well, I'll just have to keep reminding myself that I'm an adventure racer, not a 5k runner and have fun!

(Credit for the "I'm an adventure racer, not a "insert sport your doing poorly at here" goes to someone else, and is another good topic for a blog post...)

posted by Garrison at 5:03 PM 0 Comments

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

2009 Midget AR Adversity Excercise

Raced the 2009 Midget AR with John McInnes this past weekend. It started well for us with a lead after the short opening trek, paddle and run back to the TA. Then, about 1/4 mile out of the TA John's front tire exploded.

Not the tube, the tire. Right through the sidewall. KaBLAM!

I have to say that it's the first time I've seen a little bit of fear in John as we were at speed (around 20 mph) and he had to fight it a bit to get control back.

To make a long story short after 45 minutes of trying to find a new tire (including an aborted trip to the rumored local Meijer) we finally got one thanks to race director Matt VanHoosier. Even after the tire was fixed I forgot to put my helmet on as we left the TA and had to loop back. (Coincidentally from about the same place John blew his tire. We were starting to think we'd just be doing laps between that point and the TA all day.)

We rode hard for the rest of the race, made (almost) no mistakes and managed to catch all but
one team for a first place finish in the 2 person coed. (Hard to compare 2 person and 3 person times due to a slight variation in courses at the start of the race.)

It was my first time racing with John and it went really well. We race together WAY better than we do time math together...

Oh, and the coolest part of all? We got yard gnomes as trophies.

Sweet...

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posted by Garrison at 9:33 AM 0 Comments