Cavalcade of Awesome

I’ve been somewhat wrecked this week. This past weekend I ran the Jacksonville Tour de Pain.

Like the image says, the race is a grueling 3 races in 24 hours. The first race was on Friday evening at 7:30pm. It was out at Jacksonville Beach. The distance was 4 miles and you ran it on the actual beach. I don’t know if any of you guys have ever run on sand before, but it’s hard. REALLY hard. 4 miles on the beach is probably like 6 miles on asphalt. At least, that’s how it felt. Actually, I felt worse after running the beach 4 miles than I did after running the Gate River Run’s 9 miles. But part of the reason is the humidity and heat. It was overcast when I ran the Gate River Run. Anyway, I was looking to beat 40 minutes which would be 10 minute miles, but I seriously died the last mile and wound up crossing the finish line at 40:26. Just over 10 min miles. I was really not happy with that performance, but I had to live with it. I mainly was pissed about how I fell apart during the last mile. It was terrible. The time looks better than it felt, I’ll tell you that. Here’s a pic of me crossing the finish line for the 4 mile race. I felt like I was actually going to drop dead at that point.

Race 2 kicked off the next morning, Saturday, at 7:30am. Yep, 4 miles on the beach one night, then 3.1 miles the following morning. I felt okay at the start of the race, but during the final mile, I really started to feel the pain in my legs. That 4 miles really killed me. I didn’t finish the second race as strong as I would have liked, but it was stronger than the four miles. My time was 27:55, which is probably 40 seconds slower than my normal 5K runs, which is about 8:54 miles. Not bad, considering the torture I went through barely 12 hours earlier. I was a bit happier with this result. Now onto race 3.

Race 3 took place Saturday evening around 4:30pm. It was called the 1 mile sizzler. I wondered why they called it the sizzler until I got to the race site. It was still hotter than balls outside. Florida is just not a very pleasant place to run, let me tell you. It’s torture.  My goal in this race was to keep my normal race pace of 9:00 minute miles.  I was able to finish the mile in 7:29.  VERY happy with that result.  That is officially the fastest single mile I have ever run in my entire life.  And I did it after running two other races in the last 24 hours.  Like I said, very happy.

And, like the Gate River Run, we received medals for finishing all 3 races (the medal above is for the race in 2009). I love getting medals at the end of a race. So, will I do this torture again? Maybe. I’d love to improve my times but I didn’t like how the race took over the entire weekend and the downtime between Race 2 and 3 almost lost me entirely. We’ll see.

So, I’m taking this week off running and I have kind of been blank on what to write.  I have a few things in the hopper but nothing is jumping out at me.  So, I’m writing this.  Steph has been gone so I’ve been watching movies.  I’ve watched Star Trek 4, 5 and 9 as well as the final disc of 24: Season 7 since Steph has left.  I hope to also catch GI Joe: Rise of Cobra tonight or tomorrow.  OH! I also stumbled across a killer special on the History Channel called Clash of the Gods. It’s a collection of 1 hour specials each focusing on a Greek/Roman God. They air Monday nights at 10pm EST. Two episodes have already aired, the first was Zeus, which rawwwwked btw, and the second was Hercules, which was even better than Zeus. Here’s the schedule for the rest of the new episodes:

Odyssey(1) 8/17
Odyssey(2) 8/24
Hades 8/31
Medusa 9/7
Thor 9/14
Lord of the Rings 9/21
Minotaur 9/28
Beowulf 10/5

If you click here you can stream the first two episodes on History Channel’s website.

This entry was posted on August 14, 2009 at 9:44 am and is filed under exercise, life, movies, running, TV shows with tags exercise, life, movies, running, Tour de Pain, TV shows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.