Keep the faith alive

Mini Meet #1 =mission completed. Or something to that effect. I wasn't really sure what I was getting into tonight, all I knew was that I asked for the night off so I could "race" and that was that. I still at 3pm this afternoon didn't know what event I wanted to do. I thought that I had settled on doing the mile and the 200m while circling for 20 min around the parking lot waiting to pounce on a spot. When I paid my fee and signed up that was my intention. I hurried along to a half-bitten warmup (since as usual I was running late). At 6:30ish we lined up for the start of the mile, originally they were going to run guys and gals together but they deemed last min to run us separately. A little bummed for that because I was planning on pulling off some of the guys for pace, since I didn't know any of the girls who were running and was unsure of their paces. I of course pulled out front, settled back into a comfortable rhythm (a little too comfortable in the end) and ran. I stayed front leader for the entirety of the race pulled out my last lap per usual 10 seconds faster than the previous lap, hence the too comfy of a pace. My other indication that I was settled a bit too much was I recovered entirely too fast. My time was the same as I ran back in February which is neither good nor bad but my recovery tells me that I can pull a lot more out of myself. So in that end I resolved to make the meet a workout instead. At the very last minute I added the 400 into my mix of races. And when I say last min I mean, approximately 15 min (or less) after I finished the mile and 2 min before the 400 was going to start, last minute. Again ran ok, sadly I could have finished faster than I did had I opened my stride going down the back stretch--definite mental block on that one, I can pinpoint myself telling myself that I wasn't going to finish in a great time so pretty much I just strided out the last 100m. I really got to work my mental game. As I finished up the 4 I jogged down to the opposite corner for the start of the 200. Physically my body was tight at this point but I proceeded to run anyways, it's only a 1/2 a lap. Another ok time.
I was not disheartened by any of my performances. For one I had very little recovery time in between each event, two, my knee still doesn't have full range of motion without pain, and three, we just haven't gotten to the super speed workouts yet in practice. And hey I did plan on it being a practice day. In the end I'm keeping the belief of working on my head thinking way too much, more speed, and whatever else can be improved, to take my races in the next couple of weeks to the next level.