I have said it before, but this is the year of changes for me. In January, I moved to sunny Boulder, Colorado. In February, I let my palate delight in the fantastic cuisine of Tokyo, Japan for a week. In March, I signed a contract with Mizuno USA Race Team. Now for April, I am returning to the track after a 5 year absence.I signed the Mizuno deal in early March and it was finalized just a couple of weeks ago. This means that you will notice a new jersey and a new color scheme for me in future races. Every team I have ever been on, running or wrestling, has had red as its primary color. Schaumburg High School is cardinal red and gold; North Central College is cardinal red and white; Hansons is red, yellow, and black (not official team colors, but our jerseys were). Now for the first time, I am wearing blue.
In my first race in Mizuno turned out to be pretty solid for the training I have been doing leading in (base training only). I paced some of the college guys at my alma mater out to a D3 auto qualifying mark and felt like I was running a training run though I was near my PR pace. Again though, that PR was from college...5 years ago. I was not even planning to do the race until about 2 weeks out. I was back home to speak at a career day at the school where my sister teaches and wound up getting the idea to run a race while I was in town. I contacted the NCC guys and we came to the conclusion that we could all run 30 minutes without too much trouble (and we did even with a 20 mph wind, heat, and humidity to battle). We figured they could be an even greater force at outdoor nationals if they could focus on training all of outdoors instead of worrying about qualifying. We were all happy with the outcome and it was AWESOME to be able to race on my college track again.
Since my last blog, I have mostly been getting in solid base training. Although I have done a few workouts, nothing has been really "speed" focused. It was just to break up the monotony of base mileage. Now it is time to get serious. Assuming acceptance into the field, I will be running the New York Road Runner's distance carnival race 10k at the end of the Cal-Berkeley meet in 2 weeks. This leaves me just enough time to pull my reigns in on my mileage a little bit and do a couple of solid speed efforts before going out and shooting for a short-distance PR on the track.
There are probably going to be some people who question my returning to the track right now after being committed to the marathon for a solid 4 years now. So what is my thought? My marathon pace is rapidly approaching my 10k and half-marathon PRs, so if I want to run a marathon faster and under greater control I should increase my maximum capabilities in the lower distances and build back up again. Once I do that, I will return to the roads for some midrange races (half-marathon type) and start looking into my fall marathon training.
This is probably going to lead to more than one person asking me: "What fall marathon are you doing?" At this point, I do not have an answer to that question. I have some ideas on what direction I want to go, but nothing is set in stone whatsoever. There are the options of a.)fast couse, b.)US Championship, c.)marathon major, d.)smaller scale marathon to try to win. I have some options as there are several great marathons available to run in the fall. I guess that will be the next thing to figure out once I have accomplished my goals on the track. Those are my updates for now. I wish everyone a successful spring marathon and track season.
PS: Please visit my newly launched website at http://patrickrizzo.com. If anyone has any pictures from the North Central College First Chance Invite, please email me. I want to start adding a photo section to the site as well.
Patrick blogs on FloTrack
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