It's The End Of The World As We Know It...

...and I feel fine. I hear we've got a rapture coming in a few days, and if that's the case, better log the miles now. The big question is...do I take the end-of-days with a rest day, or do I race the Mike The Headless Chicken 5K?

No, really. I've run this race every year for no good reason, and it's set again for Saturday at the annual Mike The Headless Chicken festival. Colorado is ripe with oddball festivals (hello, Frozen Dead Guy Days in Nederland), and Mike The Fest, as my friend Carrie calls it, is no different. It has your typical cotton candy, bump and jump, and random vendors, but then there's also the world-famous lawnmower races, and the Run Like A Headless Chicken 5K, taking runners around in a square in some combination of heat, rain, and wind. At least, that's been my experience over the past three years. The course is unremarkable, and I've never run it with any great speed. I think maybe that's why I will probably come back swinging at it again this year. I've done no speed work in ages unless one counts that Mother's Day Mile, and haven't raced a 5K in forever. There will be no pressure for me, and I'll be able to go out and get a baseline "speed reading," or, should I say, lack of speed. It's kind of fun because I know that by the end of the summer, I'll be beginning to reap the benefits of racing short distance with a little bit of speed work thrown in here and there.

Among other things, I'm excited to see if I have any difference in racing performance with the combination of lighter weight racing shoes (my obnoxiously orange Newtons), and POSE running technique which is still a work in progress, but something that keeps my heart rate down and my efficiency as a runner higher than it ever has been. The "LIFT-POSE-FALL" gait with relaxed compression of the foot when landing on the ground was strange feeling when I first started getting coached in the technique late last summer, but I'm at a point where it's much more natural than it used to be, and it just makes more sense to run in a way that allows gravity to help me out. This video is a decent jumping-off point to get acquainted with POSE,




as is this Runners World Australia video




There are many other videos there at the POSE-TV Youtube Channel as well. While I am lucky enough to have a training partner who is an excellent teacher and coach of the method, the videos are great supplemental learning material for me, and are a decent second option for those who don't have the option of formal or informal coaching.

In other news, I'm going to go shamelessly proud mama. My middle daughter Kaia just made her TV debut as a Junior Weather Forecaster with one of the local television stations. Yeah, we're extreeeemely local here (the only reason a city our size has its own broadcast affiliates is that we're "four hours from nowhere," as my Dad back east likes to say), but it was still a neat experience. After a full tour of the television studio, Kaia did a few practice run-throughs of her spiel, and did a decent job once she'd loosened up and shook off her initial nerviness.



Now, it's time to move relentlessly forward toward the end of the school year as we know it. My life will get really nutty as the academic year winds down, so it's more important than ever now for me to log those miles and get in the runs.