Well, not literally timeless you understand, I just left my watch at home.

Again.

Anyway, I did a seven miler this morning, and it went fairly well. We did our first two miles “slowly” - slowly still being around a 9:00 pace or so. I’ll be more specific when someone with a GPS logs the run. The idea was that the next three miles were faster but still comfortable, and the last two miles were around our 5K pace.

The warmup today was difficult. Not meaning that I was struggling to keep up, it just didn’t feel “together,” I felt stiff and awkward. I did loosen up a bit as we ran, which is a good reason to do the first two miles slowly (unlike, for example, Saturday’s “long run” approach).

Most of the other people I was running with were quite a bit faster than I was, so I dropped off a little bit before the two mile point so that I wasn’t tempted to push too hard; that worked quite well. I started out the faster portion about 10 seconds behind Jan, who was up at the front when we accellerated, and she’d gained about another 5 seconds on my by the five mile point. If I’d known we were going to be so close I’d have tried to run with her, but this was alright as well. The only bad thing that happened was a close encounter with a temporary table that had been set up near the MoPac footbridge for this morning’s dedication ceremony.

I could probably have pushed those middle miles a bit harder, but it wasn’t too bad. The last two got quite a bit faster, and I dropped down to a 2/2 breathing pattern with about a mile and a half to go. Nothing really exciting happened, I just ran and enjoyed the sight of the sun peeking up over the buildings, reflecting off the lake. For the last mile I was trying to catch my rabbit, but she’d been accelerating too and I ended up coming in about 20 seconds behind her, for a 59:20 overall time. That’s a little longer than Saturday’s total, but I went out a lot slower this morning.

I think that the next time I do this run I’ll push myself a bit more. Other than that, it was just a great way to start the week. Early tomorrow morning we have our Wilke hill repeats scheduled, so I’ll probably be glad of the fact that I didn’t completely tire myself out today.

Popularity: 3%