Rain or Shine the Road is Mine

My goal was to do a 10 mile recovery run after the 1/2 marathon Saturday.  I have never really considered that "recovery" and "10 miles" could describe the same day, but since my mileage has been high for the last month or two, and I see the big dogs (yes that's you, all you guys who are always on the top mileage boards) doing that many miles or more each day, I thought it could work.

I think it did.  The first mile my legs were pretty tired, but they alternated between feeling tired and feeling good throughout the run.  My legs felt sore before the workout, but not as sore as last week after the speed one day then downhill Payson Canyon the next.  They never fully recovered for the Saturday race, so my legs feel better as I walk around today than they have since last Tuesday. 

The average pace for the 10 miles was 8:36.

Had to workout alone. Warmed up 3 miles then started into mile repeats.  My legs are still a little tired from the 1/2 marathon Saturday, but they were ok.  During my warm up I headed out for the farm roads, but it was pitch dark at 5:20 still and I got spooked by dogs barking who seemed to be approaching me and I couldn't see them so I turned around.  I stayed on Salem Canal road for the rest of the run.  I don't like running so much in the dark.  So I picked a mile on the Canal that I could do both directions.  My goal was to be 6:40 - 6:45 each mile.

1 - 6:44 going east, felt the 1/2 marathon in my legs as I got started

.5 mile rest

2 - 6:33, going west felt better on #2, which seems common

.25 mile rest and potty break

3 - 6:41 going east, I was happy to break the time from the first mile

.52 mile rest

4 - 6:46, heart breaking because I felt like I was going hard enough to break it, I thought I was going to be a couple of seconds faster.  This mile I had a hard time getting to the correct pace, and it felt hard to keep it once I got there.  I was close but off!!!

Ran just over 2 miles cooldown. 

So although I was sad to not be 6:45 or faster on the last one (can anyone say A-type personality?) overall I was happy to be able to do a speed work out on my own in the dark.  I would have waited until Wednesday to do speed, but my hubby needs me back early tomorrow so I won't be able to get in as many miles.

Had to run early this morning and get back early because my husband had a meeting to get to this morning. 

I was very surprised that I was able to hook up with different fast runners throughout the run.  This was good because I only had an hour to run. 

Ended up with a couple of miles under 7:30 and 8:02 overall pace. 

Was planning on running down Payson Canyon with three miles fast (below 6:45), but we ended up not having a driver up so we had to run up and then down Payson Canyon, with the Boy Scout camp as the turn around. 

Going up the first four miles were pretty easy slow (9:05, 8:49, 8:36, 8:41).  The fifth mile going up the canyon gets steeper and I pulled away from the group to try to do that mile hard.  I obviously didn't do the uphill at tempo pace, and when I do it's that fifth mile that is hard for me.  I ran the fifth mile in 8:38, which is actually faster than my last split for that mile during a tempo run.  I then had a slower .44 to the top (9:20 pace) and another .37 of circling around while waiting for the others to be ready to head down.

I told Mark when we started down, "I'm going to try to run this first mile under 7 minute pace since the first mile is the only serious downhill."  Well, I didn't see him much after that, but started seeing more runners coming up, including our own prodigal son, Tom Lee.   I ran that first mile in 6:00, I think my first 6 flat mile in 9 years, even when considering downhill (and this obviously was downhill).  I continued to push the second mile down but it was flatter and my split was 6:45.  After two miles down I knew I would slow if I didn't have company so I looped back for Mark who was running awesome, and we ran 6:46, 6:53 miles together.  He pulled away on the third mile and I had a 7:01 split for that one (dang, that sucks to be just over 7 minutes).  Once we got down to the bottom I tacked on another couple of slow miles (around 9 minutes). 

Overall, had 13.58 miles in 1:49 (8:02 ave pace)

Ran the Payson Canyon 10K route and continued west into the foothills to tack on more mileage.  Ran a varied pace, but over all it was 8:30, with a 9:05 first mile and one in the lower 7's in the middle, so I'm going to chalk that up as a marathon pace mile. 

The 10K course is very flat, which surprised me.  It goes through farm land to the west of the city.  I am happy about the flat nature because it should make it a great fast tempo run with Tom on Monday.  There is a slight uphill for the last mile, but I will try to forget that real soon.  I think a 6:45 pace for the 10K is doable but will be quite hard for me since I have been focusing on the marathon training -- lots of miles (at least by my standards) and tempos and speed geared toward the marathon. 

 Long run with the SF group.  Kept it easy because of 10K on Monday.  My goals for today were to bring my week up to 70 miles, and to only push one mile, up Harry's Hill (about a 1 mile incline) but I think the pace wasn't quite MP still, and I had to jump into the bushes for a potty break on the way up so it didn't go quite as well as I was hoping up the hill.  My pace up the hill was generally 8:30 about the first 2/3 up but slowed to about 9 min after the potty break. 

2:57 for 21.03, 8:25 pace.

My first 70 mile week since 1998!!!!