Three more days. . .

Until Abe's Amble. I took today off from work and running as I am working Saturday morning. I got up a little after 0600 when my son awoke and we ate breakfast and played all day.

Yesterday morning, before work, I ran a fiver with 4x2 min. surges in the middle miles. I ran the first two easy to warm-up in 8:37 and 8:27 and then ran 7:52, 8:23 and 8:28 to close it out. I felt pretty good but I didn't push it too hard on my surges because I just wanted to get the legs loosened up and ready to run fast and didn't think that pounding the hell out of myself four days before my race was going to help me at all.

I feel pretty good about my chances of running a good time on Sunday morning. The forecast is calling for scattered thunderstorms and a high for the day of 84. That should mean that we can expect the upper-60s or low 70s for race time. As long as the humidity stays somewhat low and we get a bit of a breeze there could be a lot of good times posted.

My hill training has been virtually non-existent just like last year. There really aren't any monster hills around Chatham and I don't really like running south of town in the hills there because of the enormously peaked roads and the crazy drivers. Even if there weren't crazy drivers out that way the peaked roads kill my knees and I wouldn't run there anyway. I could drive to Washington or Lincoln Parks in Springfield but I don't like to drive someplace to run. If I skunk it up at Abe's like I did last year I may have to make a point of going someplace with hills and running there every few weeks to get used to them. I think part of my problem last year is that I had never run the course and didn't know what to expect. I think that if I had known what I was getting myself into I would have been a bit more conservative in the early miles.

The tentative plan for Sunday is to go out no faster than 6:50 pace for at least the first two miles and then see if I can't maintain 6:35-6:40 pace through miles three, four and five and then crank the last 1.2 as hard as I can. I'll be happy to keep every mile under 7:00 but I would like to hit my splits in 6:50-6:59, 13:40-50, 20:20-40, 26:50-27:10, 33:30-34:00, low 40:00 and then 41:00-41:30. I think I'm being conservative here but I've done three mile tempo runs at 6:44 pace on my own and felt pretty comfortable and I think I can handle it for a 10k or even run faster.

I'll find out on Sunday morning.

Results are going to be posted during the race as it is chip timed and will be found here.