Returning to normal

A lot has happened in both my running life and professional life since I posted the day after the Bergen 5K.  At that point, things were still pretty unclear about how my future training would play out due to the injury.  Now, however, I'm glad to say that the injury is gone, and I'm even more determined to get stronger for the upcoming fall season.

 The day of Bergen, I ran the warm-up and cool-down with the team and was only a little sore, but I did not want to race out of fear of pushing too hard and hurting myself again.  It was hard to be there and not race, but I still stand by my decision to sit out.  The next day, I decided to go for a watch-less run and see if I could go a few miles at a slow pace.  I made it five miles pain-free and went out later for another four, still pain-free (maybe not the best decision at the time, but I decided to risk it). The next day, I set a limit on myself of eight miles or until pain or soreness returned.  I made it the full eight and finished up with some time on the bike, and that day was the last day on the bike.  That week, I made it just over 90 miles, all done at an easy pace (again, the mileage was a little risky).   I didn't know how quickly I should come back, considering I've been fairly resistive to injury the last few years.  Looking back, this kind of rapid return seemed appropriate.  Although the injury sucked, it wasn't terribly severe, and whether I truly believe it or not, I was in decent shape before I got injured.  Things were looking up.

At this point, however, I still was unsure if I should continue to work towards the Wineglass Marathon or defer.  I signed up for the Oak Tree Half Marathon on August 31st (the final day to defer) as an effort assessment.  I knew that I would not be in PR shape, nor would a PR happen on that course unless a miracle happened.  If I could finish the race feeling strong, I'd keep training for the marathon.  Of course, race day came, and it was in the 70s, rainy, and humid.  Kip Tisia was running, so I knew my chances of winning would be slim.  I held on to a nice pace for the first few miles before the hills came.  I finished in second, propelled by an odd sense of déjà vu, as the guy who finished 26 seconds behind me (Chris Hine) was from the same running club as the guy who finished 25 seconds ahead of me (Adrian Macdonald) at the Gettysburg North-South Marathon.  Overall, it was a good race, aside from the mile 4 marker being in the wrong place (unless I really did run a 3:57 mile, a huge PR for me). I decided to keep training for Wineglass.

Since then, it's been another two solid weeks of training and racing.  Roadkill had a nice showing at the Ovarian Cancer 5K, where I ran 16:17 and a tempo workout with George afterwards.  Despite clear, dry weather, it was a tough workout, and I'm happy with the time considering the previous seven days were the most mileage-dense of my life (141 miles!)  The next weekend was the first race of the Pete Glavin XC series on a tough course near Syracuse.  I was coming off of another high-mileage week but still felt fairly strong.  I'm now less than three weeks from the Wineglass Marathon, and after a few more tough sharpening workouts, I'll start to back off even more and prepare for the race.  It has, by no means, been the training season that I was hoping for, but I've made the best of it.

On a completely different note, I should mention some science every once in a while, considering the name of my blog.  My first graduate school article was published a couple of weeks ago!  I've been working with a semiconductor called molybdenum disulfide (MoS2).  When thinned down to a monolayer (0.6 nanometers thick, or ~1/100000 as thick as a human hair), it displays interesting properties, such as being photoluminescent (if it's excited with light, it gives off its own light signal).  The goal of this project was the first step in building a circuit based on light.  We positioned a piece of monolayer MoS2 onto one end of a single silver nanowire (a bit thicker, about 400 nm in diameter).  When a laser was directed to the uncovered end of the wire, the energy traveled along the wire and excited the MoS2, creating a detectable photoluminescent signal (this signal is different from the laser light put in).  When the laser excited the MoS2 directly, the energy was channeled into the wire and detected at the uncovered end.  Putting everything together, we could excite the uncovered end of the wire with a laser of one wavelength, excite the MoS2 remotely, recollect some of the MoS2 signal in the wire, and detect it back at the uncovered end.  The next step is to build a detector based on the same idea: we remotely excite the MoS2 to drive an electric current!