voice.in.my.ear.

Can't remember if I posted about this, or just e-mailed it around to people, but I'm running a 5K on June 3rd. This will be my first "real" race, and although it's nowhere near as impressive as the marathon's that the evil twins and their clan ran not long ago, it's a good place for me to start. I picked one that's literally in my neighborhood. The start is .69 miles from my front door, so I've been able to try it out- a few times so far. I know where the hilly parts are, and where the parts I can run the fastest are, so now I'm just working on speeding up. Yesterday I ran it with the hope of beating my time for the previous two runs(which were 31 seconds apart), but something went wrong along the way, and I finished 43 seconds behind my slowest time. I was at first discouraged, but when I hit the "end run" heading on my iPod, I heard a little voice in my ear. It was a woman's voice- a british woman's voice, and she said, "Hello, this is paula radcliffe. Congratulations. You've just recorded a new personal best for the mile." (Except when I first heard this, I thought she said polar radcliffe. I actually had to look her up online to figure out who she was.) This made me a lot happier with myself. I figure that since I sped up so much on the first mile and a half, I was more tired when I slowed it down in the middle, and must have gone slower than normal which added on to my overall time. Plus, this leaves me lots of room for improvement. Paula radcliffe though- pretty cool, huh? Apparently there's a lance armstrong voice in there for distance milestones too. That should be interesting to hit.