tara norton vid

tara asked me to put together a short compilation of some of the highlights of our shoot together so she'd have something to show her sponsors. it's basically just 2 minutes and 15 seconds of tara looking like a badass. would you want to be racing her?

for the original project, click here.

a mistake only a human would make

i was ready for yesterday's race.

i had a great first half of my warm up at the hotel in the morning.

i arrived at the race with plenty of time to get ready.

i was fueled up and hydrated.

i was familiar with the course.

i got to the starting area 20 minutes before my wave began.

i finished my warm up and patiently waited to be called to the line.

i was calm, focused and relaxed.

i was ready to race.

but even with all that preparation i'm still susceptible to making mistakes. with only seconds to go before the race began, i made my towards the starting line and realized that i'd lost my timing chip. i panicked and frantically started looking all over for it. the horn sounded and as i turned and watched the athletes take off a foggy confusion settled in. was that my wave that just started? it has to be too soon. i lost all concentration and couldn't think of what to do and feeling completely fuddled i started my timer, ran over to the starting line and asked a race official, was that the 30-34 wave?. i think so, he said. i ran over to another race official. was that the 30-34 wave? yes. already several seconds behind the pack, off i went without a timing chip. as soon as i took off everything snapped back into place. my focus returned and i caught up to my wave and started moving towards the front. i'm going to do this race. i won't have an official time but i'm still going to do this race.

gearing up

after a nasty, debilitating shin splints flare up last week, things are looking good and i'm getting ready to head down to richmond, virginia for the US national duathlon championships. this has been a tapering week so workouts have been light, but my shins feel good and have been responding quickly to the various therapies i've been using. i have to send out a huge, huge, HUGE thank you to my friend suzanne. she read my last blog post and immediately got in touch with me and gave me loads of great tips for how to beat shin splints. all of her suggestions have made a huge difference and there's no way i could have made such huge improvements without her help. she's coached me through this thing and i'm grateful to have a good friend and training partner like her.

this is what happens when you stray from what works

i've written about it here many times before: my number one goal for 2010 and beyond is to remain injury free. i've developed a plan that has been working great, and that plan involves hardly anything beyond warming up properly, icing after particularly hard workouts and stretching. no sweat. as long as i stick with that i should be much better off than i was last season, and so far i have been. well, as simple of a plan as it is, i strayed from it on thursday and am now sitting out for a few days with only a week to go before a huge race.

the race i shouldn't have done

this morning i competed at the philly's fools 10k race in whitby for the second straight year. for nearly a week i've been contemplating whether or not i should do this race, my body telling me to stay home and rest. on a workout last tuesday my legs felt like they were made of cement and i had to force myself through an otherwise easy set of intervals, and i immediately got in touch with my coach afterwards to tell him i was going to take the rest of the week off from training. i took wednesday off work because i felt like ass, i was in no better state on thursday and should have stayed home again but forced myself into the office, barely made it through the day without throwing up all over my desk, and only started to feel better that evening. i didn't show much of an improvement over the weekend and started weighing out the pros and cons of competing in this race. the cons were obvious: if i competed, my in-need-of-a-rest body would take another beating and i'd be off my feet for another week, possibly even more, recovering. some of the pros of competing were substantial and included the fact that i need this race to see where my running is at right now compared to last year. without knowing that it's hard to get a good sense of what sort of year this will be for me. i took it easy on friday and rested as much as i could and did a short 30-minute run on saturday morning. feeling ok but still not 100%, i decided then that i was at least capable of pulling off a 10k race today.