Boston announces its entrants...

Forest Park attack, Boston uses 1:38 cut off for 2014 field, reactions to this, and half marathon turned into marathon winner.

Some comments from the articles above - the Forest Park situation is a little scary seeing how many late night runs I've done in the area.  I am a little perplexed at people wanting to rob runners of all people.  It's not like I'm carrying all these valuables with me - generally I'm half naked with barely any clothing - not holding wads of cash and tons of jewelry.  Most runners barely carry anything - maybe a set of keys, and quite frankly a ton of people have lockers in the complex so chances are they have nothing on hand.  You aren't going to get much money seeing no one carries their wallet during running, and at best you get a set of car keys to a car parked somewhere miles away from that location, and then you have to figure out which car it is on top of it.  Of course, most robbers don't think that far ahead which is why they are idiots.  And then they mess with the wrong runner (who happens to be a cop) and get shot and killed, go figure.  Who's at fault here???

A little aggravated at the Boston situation - I had two friends who missed out on entry because they were penalized by the size of the field trying to get in.  One was a 3:03 guy, and missed by 20 seconds or so.  The other missed by a minute.  It's frustrating because they had absolutely no control of the situation other than what was dictated to them - the qualification times that were set by the BAA and what they aimed for, trained for, and ultimately achieved.  While I understand this year is a unique situation, I'm still aggravated with the whole system and maybe they need to look into changing qualification times again or balance out the times for age groups better.  While very challenging as is, we can't have these messy situations happening again - and now those runners, the Boston qualifiers, have to redo the process and spend another 4-6 months of their lives trying to hit this goal, if not 5 minutes better.  Not as easy as it looks, either.

Tuesday, September 24th - 0!  Slept in during the morning, and came home with intentions of running my mile repeats.  Well, felt like complete crap and had some awful stomach pains which led to throwing up and lying down all evening, so went to bed instead.  The long night's sleep was a God-send!

Wednesday, September 25th - 14 miles (4 miles A.M., 10 miles P.M. (8 x 1 mile at 6:25-6:30, 1 minute break).  Woke up early and couldn't sleep, so went for an easy run (270 loop and some change).  Had mile repeats at half marathon pace scheduled for my workout for the evening.  Warm and humid, so waited a little bit and headed out closer to 7 p.m.  Tim had a 5 mile tempo, so we warmed up together and both of us ran on the trails towards Troy and back.  It got dark a lot faster than I thought, and we were hauling butt to make it back to the trail entrance where I did my last 3 repeats.  Struggled through reps 2-5, and really thought I was going to not hit this workout.  But once I got out to Village Circle, I felt pretty good and was moving pretty well - maybe being out in the open and having some good air flow helped?  I am hoping so at least, because the last 3 miles felt a hell of a lot easier and smoother than the others.  Very pleased with the workout, and the victory jog home felt great.  Splits were: 6:27, 6:29, 6:29, 6:31, 6:31, 6:23, 6:23, 6:19.

Easy running for the next couple days.  Coach Kyle has instructed me to really monitor how I feel, and the 10K this weekend is not for certain.  Looking forward to a nice, recovery run later tonight!