Crazylegs

Saturday was our second attempt at running the Crazylegs Classic, an 8K to raise money for UW athletics. It is a HUGE event, with thousands of participants. I was nervous about it this year because my knee has been giving me so much trouble, so Wednesday, i took a little recovery run after my stupidity run on Monday. I wore my old Kayanos instead of the new Sauconys and ran a slow little 3 1/2 milers that felt pretty good. Slow, but good.
Friday night before bed, we got ready for the big day. Garmin charged? check. clothes ready? check. Ipod charged? Nope. I plugged it into the side of my computer and instantly got the blue screen of death and an error message. Restart. Got some weird Checkdisk thing that ran before booting, talking about repairing my puter and saying something about fixing orphaned files. Yikes. Long story short- after lots of farfling around, it was determined that I had bad sectors on my hard drive that crashed me and I.had.lost.everything......EVERYTHING. Crap.
Went to bed and woke up to near freezing temps and strong winds, a wind advisory. After postponing the decision to go or not, we finally got packed up and left. It was super windy and cold. We even saw a blackbird flying into the wind that was actually going backwards - no lie.
We got the car parked at Camp Randall and took the shuttle bus to the start on the capital square. the Farmers Market was in full swing, but it was just too cold to check it out while we waited for the start. We ended up loitering around inside the capital building, which was apparently the same idea a lot of other runners had since there were people everywhere and the line for the ladies room was a least 40 deep.
We finally got into the corral for our wave. We were in wave DD, which I thought was funny - my former bra size. We finally got started about 40 minutes after the first wave. Got to high five lots of UW athletes, Bucky Badger, and Uncle Sam on stilts.
I knew I was in trouble about a mile in. My knee hurt. My left foot went numb. I walked Observatory Hill (yeah that hill totally bites.). I basically walked about 1/4-1/3 of every mile. I would run until pain or numbness made me slow to walk. And then there was the cold. And the 40 mph wind gusts. There were actually whitecaps on Lake Monona as we wound around the trail next to it.
As I got near the stadium, I tried to pick up the pace a bit. It hurt. I passes a couple of race walkers and a couple other hobbled up looking runners. As I rounded the corner to run down to the finish on the 50 yd line, the race walkers had started running and passed me. Crap.
I finished with a time of 1:07.26 per my Garmin. You can check out the graphs and data on BIM here. We were supposed to meet up with some of the SWAT peoples - Gary, Al, Brian, Anne, and whoever else was there. We looked and looked and couldn't find them anywhere. Crap.
My official finish: 1:07.26 .... overall 10095/10174, age group 1212/1221. Last years time was 54:32, so this year took me an extra 12.5 minutes. that sucks.

I have been reflecting on what happened to cause the problems in my knee lately. I haven't really changed a lot. I have increased training volume, but really not enough to trigger this. My biggest issues seem to have surfaced in the past several weeks, which coincides with purchasing new shoes - a new brand and style, the Saucony Triumph 5. When I ran in my old Kayanos earlier this week, I had no trouble. I really can't continue to use the old shoes as they are definitely too worn to sustain much more mileage. So I think it is reasonable to buy a new pair of Kayanos and see if that doesn't improve the situation. It really can't make it worse. And I do have a marathon to run in 1 month. I don't think I have much choice than to give it a shot.

Mikey got my puter working sort of again, but she is limping. The sector that housed all my personal data was totally wiped and I have to build a new profile from scratch for everything. It wiped out everything, so anything I have done since I backed up last week is gone. Worst of all there are things that were only on my PC, like the templates for the SWAT team website, among other things. If you sent me email this week and I didn't respond, that's why - sorry. Ratfinkie. I hate it, now I don't trust my computer and am going to think she will screw up at any second.