leap year day!

OK, a real quick recap of this week's running adventures:

• Tuesday - Spring Creek/Norris hill workout with the gazelles. I only did 5 and they were all in the 2:20-2:30 range. (I have no idea how that compares to my historical performance since I've never been able to access my old cool running log once it moved to active.com. Grr. For this and other reasons, there is high likelihood that I will someday create a blog entry titled: "I fucking hate you, active.com.") My legs felt surprisingly fresh, but my right knee hurt like hell later that evening.
• Wednesday - PBJ on greenbelt with whole gang: Pat (post-marathon), J-Rey (slumming it on a short run) and DV (wearing the spiffy trail shoes from his win in the Maze 10K last year). We did about 40 minutes of running, with two people taking big spills. Normally I would take this opportunity to taunt them mercilessly, but if it can happen to an experienced trail runner, it can happen to me. I won't tempt karma this time. Oh yeah, and my knee still really hurt, but it went away later.
  
• Thursday - 400m repeats at austin high. We did the version where you get a minute rest and basically do as many as you can (as opposed to the sets of 5 with long break between each set). I did a total of 13: 5 @ 1:29, 5 @ 1:26, 1 @ 1:24, 1 @ 1:15 and then mellow one at 1:31. I tried --- really tried --- to keep up with John Colyandro on the 12th one, but I lost him going into the last 100m. Then I thought I would be able to take it easy on the last one and still run about 1:25, but it turned out that running 1:31 was plenty challenging. Overall, I'm mildly disappointed. I felt good aerobically, but my legs felt weak. They always feel weak. Very annoying. Since I'm hoping to run a 5K at a sub-6:00 pace this spring, I would have liked to have been a little faster than a 5-freaking-56 pace for half of them. At least my knee stopped hurting. Since I don't want him to get self-conscious, I won't talk about DV and his heart rate monitor.
  
• Today - I spent over an hour waiting in line to cast my vote for Barack. It's nice to see so many people giving a damn and voting, but I wish I wasn't trying to vote at the same time as all of them. Does anyone know why they won't let you use a cell phone close to the voting booths?
  

March starts tomorrow. It's a big month running-wise. I'm planning to run 2 5Ks (star flight on March 8th and daisy on March 15th) and if I don't manage to run sub-19:20 in one of them, I'm gonna get pretty freaking mopey. I'm hoping to follow those up one month later with the bun run on April 13th.

Also, and I can't believe I'm saying this, I'm looking forward to next week's tempo run. It will give me some idea of where I stand fitness-wise.