More awesome race photos. And by awesome I mean horrible.

I collect my own bad race photos, of which I have quite the collection. I have some beauties from my half marathon this weekend for your perusal:

I can run half-marathons with my eyes closed!

Heh.

Nice face.

After running this half, a 5 mile slow run the next day, and some speed work this morning, now both of my Achilles tendons are twanging when I walk up a flight of stairs.  Great.  The only time they don't do that weird twang is if I am walking up the stairs in heels.  I can't figure out this weirdness.  Again, there's no pain....just weirdness.

But my speed work session went fantastic this morning (6 x 800m).  I was forced to treadmill it due to high winds and thunderstorms, but thankfully the Science channel had some awesome engineering disaster shows on this AM, so I was pretty engrossed in the ol' boob tube. I was also pretty comfortable at my 10K pace for all the repeats except for the last two, where I started to feel them, but I wasn't sucking air or wishing the little dot thing would move faster around the treadmill screen before I collapsed and died or anything.  I was pretty impressed with myself, actually, for keeping it together mentally.  This may have been because of my new running mantra:

"Suffering is optional.  It's all in your mind."

It's working for me for now.  One of these days I will have to do a post about all the mantras I've come up with over my running years.  I go through them like sports bras.  But not tonight; it's late and I have an easy 6 miler in the morning, which I shall be running in my new Brooks Glycerin 10s.  Maybe new shoes will stop my Achilles tendons from twanging away.