Race Time is Upon Us

The fall race season is right around the corner here in Texas and it’s time to start figuring out this year’s racing goals and target races.  My ultimate goal is to actually race (as opposed to just run) a winter ultra.  The focus of my fall races will be frequent mid distances (10-15 miles), speed, and building my weekly distance to around 70 miles.  

I haven’t been doing regular speed workouts so I figure if I enter more races it will force me to do speed work at least on race day.  Of course the more you race hard the more chance of injury.  My second goal for the fall race season it to practice race day specifics; breakfast, food choices, hydration strategies etc.

My local running peeps and I came up with a list of races we wanted to run.  We haven’t signed up for most of these yet.  Barring injury, I’m pretty sure my fall race schedule will be pretty close to the following:

Sept 8 - Big Dipper Dash 5k Awareness 5K

Oct 13 - Woodlands 10 Miler  (SOLD OUT)

Oct 14 - The USA 10 miler 

Oct 28 - The Houston Half Marathon
Nov 3 - Rocky Raccoon 50K/25K 

Nov 3 - Firefly Run 5K
Nov 11 - Color Run 5K (Team: Coloring Outside the Lines)

Nov 18 - The HMSA Classical 25K

As of now the Color Run is the only race I've signed up for.  This is a pretty aggressive race schedule and I'm already wondering if I have too much on my plate.  The back to back 10 milers, if I'm healthy, I know I can complete, but racing them is another story.  Obviously I'm worried about a 50K and then a 10K in the same day. The other big worry of mine is recovery time between races.  What I don't want to happen is that I race nearly every weekend and sit around recovering dead legs during the week.

One thing that I hope will help in all this is a Biggest Loser style contest that a group of us at work have entered.  That should be plenty of motivation to drop my body fat to racing levels.  The level of smack talking we've already begun doing is really plenty of motivation to up my workout intensity.