Two Steps Forward, Two Steps Back

by EJN November 3, 2016 Comments (0) Articles, Guest Post, Racing Like

I saw Nate Jenkins on the starting line at the Lone Gull 10k back in September, and was a little surprised he was there. Nate missed some time due to a stress fracture and was working his way back. He’s generally not the type of guy to line up for a race just to take a beating (i.e. race his way back into shape), but even at less than 100% he was still going to be a force to be reckoned with. Still…a part of me was thinking ‘I might have a shot at beating Nate today!’

Long story short, I still lost to Nate. There’s really no need to rehash that. But, the comeback continues for Nate. His latest was the Great Bay 5k on October 29th, and we have an excerpt from his training log here:

Training October 24 to 30, 2016, two steps forward, two steps back.

Saturday AM 3 mile warm up, first mile with Melissa, 22:35, full drills, half a dozen or so strides with two 30 second efforts. Race: Great Bay 5k, 2nd place 15:23. First place was Neal Darmody, he broke away right off and I went out in 5th. After about the first 1k which is slightly uphill I moved by the two guys I was following and surged up to Chris Antunes who had a 5 to 10 yard gap. I got up to him at about the mile, which we passed in 5:01.5, for the next mile Chris did most of the work and I would push the downhills, we passed two miles in 9:55.9(4:54.4), I inched away from Chris in the third mile but didn’t close the large gap on Neal at all, 3 miles in 14:51.1(4:55.1). Obviously this is much better than three weeks ago. I got a better effort, it is also a faster course, about 30 to 40 seconds quicker usually compared to Great Island. These are actually the three fastest miles I have run since coming back, though obviously my 100’s are at a much faster pace. After we, Melissa and I, had a nice conversation with Neal and his wife Micaela who I knew as a 50lb kid running for the greater lowell youth team back when I was a Greater Lowell guy. I definitely felt old but they were real nice. 1 mile cool down with Melissa tot. 7+

Summary The race was a big step forward. However afterwards I had noticeable discomfort/odd feeling in the area I had the stress fracture. As such I took Sunday and Monday off. Feels fine now. I got some treatment and changed up my exercises a bit. Hopefully a bump in the road but I’ll probably avoid speed work until at least this weekend. Also with the day off and two days of just 4 so far this week the volume will be lower as well. I was bitching to Anna about the pain coming back and she basically laughed at me telling me how bad my form still sucks and how I should expect problems. So one step at a time I suppose.

Follow Nate’s comeback more closely on his blog…