GO STATE! BEAT THE PANTHERS!

First off, I wanna make a sort of public service announcement. My sister lives in Chicago and got hit by a car while she was running the other night. She wrote something up and wanted me to put it in here for anyone who actually reads this blog...

"I know way too many runners who leave the house without any form of ID--either you don't have pockets or just don't feel like carrying it around. It's not just stupid, it's completely irresponsible. I got my wake up call yesterday--I was out for a run when a car ran a red light and hit me. Fortunately, all my injuries were minor--cuts and bruises and one badly sprained ankle. The worst part was that at the time, all I had on me was my house keys. No cell phone. No ID of any form. No emergency contact information. Had I been knocked unconsious, none of the bystanders would have known who I was, where I lived, that I take medication for asthma, or who to contact for me. Not only that, I have most of my phone numbers of my friends and family programmed into my cell phone, but I know very few off the top of my head--really just my parents' house and my former roomate.
Check out http://www.roadid.com/ They make ID tags that attach to your shoe, or you can wear them as a necklace or wrist or ankle band. I've also seen some running stores here in Chicago that sell cheap tags that attach to your shoe. It's not enough just to have ID, you need to carry emergency contact info so your friends and family can find out what happened. Everyone thinks this will never happen to them, I know I didn't. I just want to get the word out to every runner or walker I know, even if you're just going around the block (I was less than a mile from my house), carry an ID. You just never know."

So that's her story...it's crazy when it hits close to home, and I know I'm guilty of not carrying ID either. Like she said, I guess you never know when something like that will happen.

This week has been one crazy heck of a week...I'm gonna summarize....

Sunday morning I ran what I thought was 16 miles, but I retraced the route and got 15.5 miles....oh well. And I accidentally erased the time from my watch, so I don't know splits or anything! My ankle really hurt near the end because I accidentally stepped in a pothole in the last couple miles, but it felt better over the course of the next couple days.

Tuesday I only did 4 on the elliptical because I didn't wanna stress the ankle and also because I was so darn busy and had to get things done. Today I did a speed workout consisting of 1 mile warmup, 3 x 1600 with 800m jogs afterward, and 1 mile cool down for a total of 6.5 miles. My training plan wanted me to go at 5:34 pace, but the 3 miles ended up being 5:42, 5:46, and 5:37. I ran fairly equal splits though, so I'm happy with that.

Tomorrow morning I'm gonna do an easy 4 or 5 miles as recovery, and then we're leaving for Pittsburgh! It's MSU's first road football game of the season against the Pitt Panthers and we scrounged up enough money thru fundraisers to take the band along! So it should be a great time. I just hope we can hang with them because they look like a scary team...

I'm out.