Long Run

OK. Enough of this humidity. I am officially tired of it.

Saturday we had an 8-10 mile run in the park. I had planned on 10 miles at a 9 minute pace since this was our long, slow distance run. We broke into groups and then further dissected into pace groups. Steve was leading our group and asked how many 9 minute milers there were. Since there were only like 8 of us (out of the 30 or so advanced runners) and the rest of the group was shooting for 9:30s or 10:00s we were the "fastest" group.

This kind of setup has gotten me into trouble more than once.

Why?

Well because since the 9:00 pace group is the fastest, it means that the faster boys have no other choice than to run with us. 9:00 is slow for them but they're leading the pack. Since I am still figuring out my pace (I am now getting MUCH closer to knowing what 9:00 feels like vs 8:30, but am still not there yet) I have a hard time with this. My running buddy Lauren and I dropped back from those boys within the first mile, but according to my Garmin we were still running fast.

Up at 102nd we lost the back of the group, and as we turned the corner we lost the fast boys.

So from mile 2ish onward it was just me, Lauren, the other Emily and Coach Steve.

I was feeling sluggish and I think it was due to the pace more than the humidity, although the humidity didn't help either. I was like "10 miles is sounding a bit ambitious to me today." Lauren agreed right away, so that made me feel like less of a wimp. We now planned on an 8-miler.

With 4 miles completed, we had an average 8:40 pace. I told the girls I was going to drop back a little. They were actually okay with dropping back with me. Steve went back to check on the girls behind us. It was just too gross out, and taking that pace 20 seconds faster than planned for four miles took it's toll on me.

We just planned on running the rest easy. Like, for real easy. I think it actually helped that Coach Steve was NOT running with us.

Turns out that my "really comfortable easy pace" for those next four miles was 9:20. So...

The entire thing average out to a perfect 9:00 pace for 8 miles.

Now we just have to flip it so that we negative split the thing. If we had done that, I bet we would have felt much better.