Well. That Made "Blah" Look Like "Whee."

So Saturday's races were "blah."  I chalked it up to "one of those things" and decided that Sunday would be better.  It was bound to be, right?  Better nights' sleep, one day of racing under my belt, and my favorite distance--the 5K--on tap.  What could go wrong?

As is turned out...everything.

Just as the weekend started well with Friday's pre-race skate and then took a nosedive Saturday, so Sunday started out well and then soon jumped into the toilet (which may be a perfect analogy, and a little foreshadowing there for you literary types).

Anyway, Sunday started out good. Good sleep, good strong coffee, good warmup laps to...good?...music (Sunday morning featured the "House of Hair.")  True, I did have to abort my pre-race warmup for a quick run to the bathroom, but, you know, pre-race nerves and all that.

Which didn't explain why I'd had to do the same thing on the trip down on Friday, but oh well.  And so what if I'd felt mildly queasy off and on throughout the weekend?  It hadn't affected my ability to put away all that pizza and ice cream Saturday, had it?

So I approached my first race, the 1000 meter, with at least marginal enthusiasm.  On days when I do the 1000 and the 5000, I pretty much consider the 1000 to be merely the final stage of my warmup.  So I wasn't too stressed about it as I toed the line.  I was a little more stressed when I felt the "nothing there" feeling when I tried to skate the opener hard...and more stressed when I heard the first full lap at 36-something...and even more stressed when I heard the final time of 1:37.09.

Well.  That was quite a bit slower than I'd hoped to skate.  Slower than any Milwaukee 1000's since October of 2011.  Almost as slow as a couple Roseville times.

Not good.

So I prepared for the 5K.  Tried not to think about the four slow races I'd skated thus far.  Replenished the now-depleted caffeine stores (coffee only lasts so long) with some "go fast juice."  Skated some warmup laps.

Oh, and I prepped my new toy.  Sprinter Boy had told me that Viking (skate and skate equipment manufacturer) has an app that turns your iPad into a lap board.  Since I had the iPad along, I decided to download the app and give it a try.

(Yes, that's an iPad displaying a lap time.  No, I don't know why it's upside down...but it does show that when the coach holds it so the athlete sees the large numbers right-side-up, the coach also sees the smaller numbers that he selects from right-side up.  Pretty cool.)

And then I went out to skate the 5000.  And I knew, from lap one (all 39.18 seconds of it) that a sub-8:38 was not happening.  A good race was not happening.  Maybe a MAT I time was not even happening.

But I skated.  Sprinter Boy diligently gave me my lap times with the iPad and yelled encouraging thoughts ("don't forget to breathe!").  I focused on recovery strokes and corner entries and not letting my lap times--by lap five, hovering in the unheard-of territory of the mid-43 seconds--creep into the 44's.  For perspective, in my first and only 10K last year it took until lap 12 before my lap times left the 43's.  Today, in the 5K, I kept them in the 43's--but just barely.  Lap five featured a 43.93, but fortunately that was my slowest one.  Six of my final seven laps had negative splits; I'm not sure what that means, but I sure was happy to hear them.

I was not, however, happy to hear my final time of 8:57.15.  It was my slowest 5K since my very first one back in November of 2007 and that one, at 9:04, had featured back cramps that had me standing up multiple times.  Epic fail.  Oh, I did make the MAT I time, but just barely.

It sucks to suck, but it sucks more to not know why you suck.  I'm a very logical person and I need reasons.  If I know my thyroid was undermedicated or I had PVC's or I was overtrained or undertrained or whatever, then I'm more OK with sucking...because I know what I have to change (even if, as with the PVC's, I have no control over it and can only hope that it changes on its own.)  This time...I got nothing.  Thyroid seems fine, I didn't feel any PVC's, and my training seemed pretty spot-on.

Or, well, I got almost nothing.  There's still that mild-and-transient stomach/intestinal thing.  I'm still not feeling 100% today, Monday (thanks again, Governor Dayton, for the day off!).  So maybe I was a little sick.  But if I was, it was a very little.  I don't see how it could have had that much effect on my skating; I skated three personal bests, including an 8:16 5K, in December of 2007 in Salt Lake with bronchitis that had me on two different antibiotics in the two weeks prior to the meet.  So what's a little queasiness?

But what's done is done, and it's time to look forward.  When we finally get out of the deep freeze there will be skating workouts; there will be CrossFit and dryland and watching Olympic Trials on the DVR to see how "real skaters" do it.  We've set up another 10K time trial in Milwaukee this year, for Feb. 1, so there will be training and planning for that.

Plenty of time to leave "Blah" behind and get (relatively) fast again.