Five Final Thoughts on the 1500

ONE: After a race, I quite often talk about where I could have been faster. It's a good "self-critique" that keeps me working towards being a faster runner. But seriously, I did about all I could at this 1500 this past weekend. Yes, that 2nd lap was slower than I had hoped, but I corrected for that right away. And I didn't crap out like I did in the TC 1 Mile last month: I didn't quite go 100% all the way to the line in that race, but I sure did this past weekend.

TWO: On that note, this is about the first time I can HANDS DOWN say that checking my splits during a race made me faster. I'm not used to running such a short event, but I knew what I had hoped to do for the race. After 2 laps, I thought I was giving it my all, but my 2nd lap told me I had let up a bit. (Again, not used to racing SO HARD and SO SHORT.) That made me hit the last 2 laps harder (well, it made me make sure to up the effort for the 3rd lap). In a lot of longer races, you could easily argue that by always checking my splits I'm not giving it ALL the effort I have, and you could possibly be right. But in this race, checking my splits made me speed up after 2 laps, and I know it made me faster. (Related: teammate Jamie who ran right on my tail for the entire race noted just after finishing that I hit the last 1 or 2 laps really hard! I wonder if he was starting to close the gap a little, and then I started to pull away. Regardless, he was close enough to notice an obvious shift in speed.)

THREE: One thing that helped me here was that one track workout 10 days pre-race. Yes, doing ONE track workout before a track meet probably isn't all that I should be doing, but I had honestly kind of forgotten about the meet until about 2 weeks prior. I had hoped to race the 5000, but the track workout I did was more specific towards the mile/1500, so it worked out well that I ended up racing the 1500 with my team. I did some 400 repeats at the St. Thomas track, and I descended them nicely.

FOUR: In my race report, I shared my Instagram post from just after the race at the end, and I said something like "Well *THAT* was unexpected!" My TIME was about what I expected. I just thought there'd be a slightly bigger crowd at the race. It was small enough that I was able to take home a medal. My performance didn't surprise me, but the number of athletes did.

FIVE: When I feel "adequately" trained, I think I have this feeling that it will be easy to break 5:00 in the mile. (Or break the mile equivalent of 4:37 as I wanted to do in this 1500.) But it is NOT F*CKING EASY. And this is no surprise: it's getting harder every year. Now, EVERYTHING needs to go right from the start. So I'm taking more and more joy when I DO crack that barrier, because I'll be over that barrier one of these days, and I might not ever get below it again.

Here's my 1500 "USATF MN Masters Championship" race report if you missed it.