Today was a bit of a change - we met up at a new location for our long run, starting out at Porter Middle School around Lamar and 290. There were a ton of people there, I counted at least 28 which is pretty incredible since we were all part of the fall marathon group.

I ended up falling in with Jay and Jason. We started talking about the fact that most people did these runs way too fast. With a marathon goal pace of 8:00/mile, my target should range around from 8:30-9:30, basically orbiting a 9:00 pace. Gilbert actually recommends between a 9:00-9:30. Becuase of this, we ended up near the back of the pack, behind everyone we normally run with.

We headed up Lamar for two and a half miles to the trail and ran over to MoPac, then looped around to the Robert E Lee bridge. I was feeling fairly good for this part of the run, and we’d averaged about a 9:30 pace - including a couple of water stops and traffic lights. It felt a little odd to be out there pretty much by ourselves, but we were doing the right thing by not charging out. I just have to keep repeating that to myself, and maybe I’ll even start to believe it!

Unfortunately from that point on I started to go downhill, both literally and figuratively. Taking those in reverse order, I had made a pretty big mistake the evening before and ate my dinner after 9:00 PM. By five miles into the run, it felt like I had a brick in my stomach. Now this is weird - I never get cramps, and these weren’t, precisely, but whatever it was I was not a happy camper.

That’s too bad really, because the rest of the run was really interesting. We headed out down Barton Hills, the same street we take to get to Wilke, which should give you some idea about the terrain. Yeah, the second half of our run was hilly. I need a lot more work with the hills, and was actually looking forward to it, but all I was thinking about was my gut.

Three miles into the hills we came to our second PowerAde stop of the day, and it wasn’t a moment too soon. I was able to keep my pace close to that of the first half, but was having no fun doing it. Put it this way, I was actually pretty happy to find out that I hadn’t slowed down. Much.

One and a half miles of Barton Hills later, we had looped around and were back at the waterstop. I downed another few shots of PowerAde and we took off on Barton Skyway back to the start. Right off we hit a decent hill, which was followed by an indecent one. I felt so lousy that I actually ended up walking some of thie hill, which I’m not particularly proud of.

As I got back to the school, I was just happy for this one to be over. Well, almost. I did a one kilometer cool down run, a little light stretching, and then headed over to the short track for some strides to finish up. That’s when I got another surprise. About 20M into the stride, I started feeling a tightness over my right kneecap. Needless to say I stopped and stretched, then tried again - same result. I don’t know what exactly what it was, but it bugged the heck out of me.

I had been planning to skip the stretching, but after that I really didn’t think it would be a good idea. Thirty minutes of carefully applied tension later, and I was feeling a whole lot better. Hopefully it was just one of those things, and won’t come back to haunt me in the future. Still, close on twelve miles in what turned out to be harder than normal conditions is probably a reasonable part of my training - but hey, I only need the one, alright?

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