Holiday Classic 3k

It's been an emotional 24 hours. I found out late last night that my alma mater is planning on eliminating the men's track and cross country teams. After a near sleepless night and some considerable debate about how to wear a shoe over the inflammation that's recently developed on the top of my foot, I decided to go ahead and run the 3k. Coach Ihmels graciously let me wear my old "Southwest Missouri" jersey as a tribute to my fallen comrades down in Springfield. Needless to say there was a lot on my mind and I owe an apology to Dan Taylor, a training partner and friend. We had planned on running 8:20 pace through 8 laps (2400 meters on our 300 meter track). We were going to alternate the lead every two laps and I volunteered to take the first two. Unfortunately, I messed it up big time and I was 7 or 8 seconds slow for the first two laps. Then Dan took his two laps and got a lot closer to the right pace, but we were probably about two more seconds slow through that 600 meters. Then I took two laps and then Dan took the lead again. My original plan was to run 8:20 pace through 2k and then go from there. So when we came up on the 2k mark I decided to stick to the original plan despite how slow we had been up to that point. I finished in 8:25.44 and Dan was 2nd in 8:32. Considering it was my third workout this week and the last two weeks have been over 90 miles I'm pretty happy with the effort (as long as I can get the inflammation out of my foot sometime soon.)