I'm a hell of a lot stronger than I thought I was.
I got up this morning at about 0530 even though I didn't really want to. I had a full bladder and after I'd emptied it I was wide awake and staring at the ceiling. I put on some shorts and let the dog outside and after I had given him his treat and opened the sports page I heard my son call for me from his bedroom. We got breakfast ready after watching the Wiggles, a waffle and Silk for him and Quaker Oat Squares and coffee for me. At about 0900 we went in and woke Kim up and I headed out about twenty minutes later for a sedate ten mile jaunt along the old Lincoln Memorial Half Marathon course.
I chose to run the old LMHM course because I wanted to get some practice on the hills as the old course and the new course have similar elevation profiles and I didn't want to drive into Springfield to run the new course when the start of the old course is only a few miles from my house.
The temps were absolutely balmy compared to what they've been the last few days at 30 degrees, SSW 14, 65% humidity and a wind chill of 20. I haven't been keeping up with my running very well this year due to some instances of a sick kid, sick mother-in-law, crappy weather and another incident that I'm not quite ready to explain in this forum. One or two of you know anyway.
I started off at what felt like a nice easy pace and just kept reminding myself to relax and run easy up the hills and was very surprised to see that I hit the 5 mile turnaround point in 38:01. On the course map the 5 mile mark is also the 8 mile mark so when you're looking at the elevation profile just skip from mile 5 to mile 8.
Once I turned around I had the wind to my back and I took an energy gel because I'm trying to get my stomach used to them again. I used them with much success the first time I ran the LMHM in 2005 and quit using them after that as Gu upsets my stomach. I switched to PowerBar shots or something like that. At the 2006 and 2007 LMHM I didn't use energy gels and didn't perform as well as I would have liked. I wonder how much the energy gels help.
As I was saying, I turned around, took an energy gel, and had the wind to my back. I pocketed my gloves, un-zipped the vents on my jacket and stuffed my beanie in the waistband of my tights and rocketed my way back to the starting point in 35:38 for a total ten mile time of 1:13:40.
Ironically, I set a personal best for ten miles by 2:14 in a practice run. This is a week after running 8 in 1:03:31 and two weeks after running 10 in 1:19:33. I'm not exactly sure why today was so fast but I'm wondering if it wasn't the two cups of coffee two hours prior and the energy gel halfway in.
Either way, I'm getting a good feeling about this year's LMHM.
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7 comments:
Wow. That's awesome. Great work.
I ran 6.9 today in 53 minutes. I've been running about 15 miles a week for a while now, and I am probably in the best shape I've been in since Spring of 2006.
If you're worried about accuracy, you could check it at gmap-pedometer.com.
I'm not worried about accuracy at all. I've run the course twice in races and two more times before the markings wore off and I'm pretty sure that I ran a full ten today. If I didn't run a full ten I ran 9.98.
That's a pretty decent clip for your run. Good job. If you can keep running a few miles a week in med school I'll be impressed. A lot of our residents start in Radiology their second year looking skinny and finish up three years later looking rotund.
I've been doing most of my longer runs right at 7:40 pace. Once a week, I head to the bike trail and do a 2-mile time trial to add a little variation. I've been running well. I'd like to run a 15K in May, and I'd like to run it a decent clip. We'll see.
How have your time trials been?
I ran my 15k in September in 1:06:06. I'm sure you can smash that.
Pretty consistently right around 12 minutes, give or take a bit. In high school, we didn't do any interval work in the offseason, but we religiously did a 2-mile time trial on Tuesdays. I'm just revisiting that approach... minus about 40-50 extra miles per week.
The problem with the 15K is going to be the distance. On my longer runs, I start running into some groin issues at 40 minutes. It happens unless I'm wearing tights, so whatever it is, compression seems to help.
Looking back at a previous entry, it looks like you were hoping for 1:35 in your half. After yesterday's run, you've got to feel really good about your chances there, don't you?
Yeah, after yesterday I feel pretty good about running my half in the 1:35 neighborhood. I'm hoping that some speedwork in the next 8 weeks will help out too.
I'm not running anything balls out and I'm keeping whatever tempos or reps I get in at a relaxed pace. I did a three mile tempo a few weeks ago in 20:20 and ran 6:48, 6:46 and 6:45 mile splits. Two weeks ago I ran 4x400 in 1:24.81, 1:24.72, 1:24.91 and 1:24.43 without difficulty.
I wonder what's up with your groin? That is actually a weird question to post on my blog but I wonder what's going on?
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