Monday, May 14, 2007

weekend

Saturday was 3 miles, they seemed tougher than they should have, this probably had something to do with the mass quantities of "Bagel Bites" and beer consumed the night before... probably... I ran to the middle school did 8 laps around the track and ran back home, when I checked out my time I started questioning the length of the track, according to my conversion I was doing 6:23 per mile, as much as I fell confident that I could run that sort of pace for 3 miles I sure didn't feel like I was on Saturday. There's really only 2 reasons for this that I can think of: a) the track is shorter than 400m or b) running on a flat track (as opposed to slightly hill side walks) really makes a big difference... there's a definite difference between what I believe and what I'd like to believe... oh well, I'll figure it out soon enough...

After my rough Saturday morning I decided that my 7 miles could wait until the early Sunday evening. I'm glad I waited as I was better rested and more mentally prepared as well. The run went as such... smooth, difficult, painful, slow, easy, nice... in that order. The down hill portion to Lincoln park seemed difficult (I'm learning to hate running down hill), once I got to the eastern boarder of Lincoln I felt an unusual pain in my shins and my feet felt like bricks but I kept going because, frankly, I can't stand the idea of not finishing a run I start. By the time I wrapped around Coleman pool I was feeling good but I felt like I was just plodding along, eventually that good old 'runner's high' kicked in and the rest of the run was just enjoyable... based on some in-my-head calculations I had decided during my run that an end time of 55 minutes or so would be okay, I ran without looking at my time once, so when I hit my cool down point I was pleased to see that I had finished in 51:47 (7:31 min./mile). I feel like it's a good sign that I felt as though I was running slow at some point, it makes me sense that I could go faster than I did... I keep thinking about a 3:05 marathon (which just so happens to qualify some one of my age for the Boston marathon...), it's starting to fell like a more realistic goal, but I'm not committing to anything just yet...

Tonight's a night off (sensing a trend?) then Tuesday's a 3, Wednesday a 5, and Thursday a 4... funny to think that my long range goal is to run more miles in a single setting than I will all this coming week... now that's something to look forward to...

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