Short Circuiting the Relay

Here's a tip for you - never volunteer for anything. More to the point, never be volunteered for anything. A few months ago I was "volunteered" to coach some work teams to run the Silicon Labs Austin marathon relay and pulled onto the "fitness and wellness" committee. The race is this coming Sunday, we have two full teams turning out and I was slated to run a 5k leg for the elite team (how the hell I managed to be an elite anything is beyond me). Everybody who committed to run had signed up except for the guy who pushed for us to enter corporate teams in the event and who pushed me to coach the teams. He was scheduled to run the first leg in the elite team, is a very fast runner but never turned up for any of our group runs and stopped responding to emails. He assured us he was fully committed to run until he suddenly dropped out yesterday. All our backup fast runners were already signed up for the B team which left me looking at running both the 10k and 5k legs in a fast time and sucking up a double entry fee (since I had to register and pay for the whole team beforehand). Fortunately we found a guy who agreed to run a 5k leg for us, allowing me to switch to the 10k.

Except that I've already committed to a 22 mile run tomorrow (including a RRFit run). If I was only running a 5k I could get away with a fast leg, but a hilly 10k is another matter. I'm not prepared to compromise my training schedule for a rinky dink fun run I never wanted to do in the first place, but at the same time I don't want to let down the other guys who've signed up to run on our team - we've had some good laughs running together over the last few months. So I'm going to do my 22 miler tomorrow, have an ice bath afterwards, and go out fast on Sunday and see how long I can hold on. Sounds like a good challenge - I've always said my main running strength is mental toughness so let's see if that's true, or if I'm just full of it.