This IS Denny's!

At Denny's you get a Grand Slam breakfast. At TWSS, you get a Grand Slam of events in one weekend!

I never would have pegged third weekend of March for unbelievable performances, especially not when it's 32 degrees at race time. Fortunately, it "felt" warmer than 32 and DC proved it is a fast place to race.

National Half Marathon: Ben got after it, finishing in 1:10:36 and taking 6th place. We saw him at 3 and we was in a nice little group, including marathon runnerup Mike Wardian. A wise Ben backed off the pace when he felt it speed up beyond his liking, and still came through 5 in 26:50. We missed him at 10 and 12, but it didn't matter, because he was cruising. While this is a little off his all-time PR, the result exceeded his own expectations and, more importantly, has put faith in his upcoming marathon.

Shamrock 8k: VA Beach. We need to start going down to this race. Why? There were 7000 people or so in the 8k. 2/3 of them were chicks. Old Man Berardi ran 28:06, which is pretty awesome, and Julia R-U-double-D snagged 8th overall for women with a spectacular 29:35.

National Marathon: Brennan's first marathon, Dave Ploskonka's probably 50th. But both got results they'd never seen before. I'll have to get Brennan's mile splits from him to put in the comments, but seriously, how perfect of a first race is negative splitting the way he did? Average per mile was 6:20 through 10k, 6:15 by the half (1:21:52), 6:12 at 20mi and 6:11 by the finish. Last two miles were 6:08/6:04, and the 4 I saw with him were 14-18 at 5:55, 5:58, 5:58, 6:08. I barely run that fast for a 4 mile race. He was in the zone (hey maybe we should have an AutoZone athlete of the week??). 2:42:01 was the end result, about a minute better than his goal, and 17th place was his position. Meanwhile Dave ran 2:56:32, a roughly 3 minute PR. Collin Anderson also ran the race, but as a pacer for the 3:15 group. Must be nice to run a 3:13 and have it not take much out of you!

Shamrock Half Marathon: Julia makes the excellent double, running the half on Sunday in 1:24:09. That's some hefty work for a girl who's never raced longer than a 10k! Tom Stott wanted to run 6:30s and that's exactly what he did - finishing in 1:25:07. A great weekend down in Virginia Beach. Oh and remember that 2:1 ratio of chicks to dudes? Applies in the half as well. It seems like VA Beach must be overrun by women this weekend. Let's go next year.

Purple Drink Athlete of the Week: Could it be any other? Brennan Feldhausen showed that, despite his young age, he showed more poise and discipline than many of his older friends who race like high school JV teams (yeah, I'm talking about me). His hard work over the past few months, including his workouts with Ben and Arjun and attention to detail, all paid off in one fell swoop. And while his season is, with baseball coming back, effectively done for now, the fitness he's gained will remain with just a little bit of work over the next few months and he can get back at it in the fall.

Week Ahead!!

Don't forget, we are going to be on the track (Gilman) NEXT WEEK. We'll meet at 6:00 for the warmup and 6:30 for the workout. If this seems to not work out we can always adjust back to 6:30/7:00, but in an effort to get home a little bit earlier, we'll start earlier.

And Friday is Dudes Night Out in Towson, where we will celebrate Terence's birfday and watch the Sweet 16 games. Alert me if you plan on joining and when I firm up details, I'll send them out.

Let's have an adventure.