A lot of my marathon training group got the message to meet at 5:45 this morning because we were scheduled to jump from a 7 mile Monday run to a 10 miler (and stay there until NYC). For some reason about 8 of us never heard about it, so we were there at 6:00. Heck, I was lucky to get there by 6:00 and only managed that because I hit the lights just right. Either way, we headed out belatedly to go around the lake. The goal here was to do 5 miles easy (60% effort) and 5 miles harder (80% effort ~ 10K pace).

Pete started with us, but he took off very early into the warmup. I’m sure it was still a warmup for him, he runs solid sub-3:00 marathons on a regular basis, but even so we watched him disappear down the trail. A mile or so into the loop Kenny, who’s serving as an assistant coach this time around, directed us to cross over on the I-35 bridge and run the “wrong” way until we found the rest of the group (who met at 5:45), then turn around and continue on with them. Fair enough, and that’s how I ended up doing 8 1/4 miles instead of either 7 or 10.

This worked fairly well. My warmup ended up being 3.22 miles in 30:28 for an average pace of 9:28. According to my trusty HRM my pulse is dropping during the warmups, probably more due to getting used to the weather (75 degrees, 75% humidity) than anything else, but that’s still nice; I ranged from 145-155 during that segment. We’d gone a little past the rest of the group to hit a mile marker before turning around, and I ended up running next to Jason and behind Summer by 45 seconds or so. Jason took off underneath I-35 with a 7:45 goal pace, and I took my speed hit at the usual place from the seven mile runs, at the middle of the boat ramp, so I was on my own when I picked it up.

In retrospect I’d like to say that I was aiming to do my marathon goal pace, because I did, but I really wasn’t thinking it through that far. Actually I’d have liked to do more like 15 seconds faster than my goal. Instead I was a little bit all over the place:

I caught up to Summer at some point during mile two, and stayed ahead of her fairly well. Mile three I took a little easy, planning to go out harder for the last two miles, and I heard her come up behind me near the end; I picked things up at that point and she pulled off to grab a drink of water anyway. Mile five, however, was something of a disappointment; even though I knew I was feeling tired I really thought that I was maintaining my speed better than I did. Maybe this weekend in the sun took more out of me than I realized.

I drank 4-5 cups of water after I finished, waited a few minutes to let my heart rate cool down, and then finished up with 5 acceleration striders on the grass and a 10 minute accelerated stretching session before heading out. I felt pretty good, like I had done a moderately solid workout, which I had. I probably could have gone faster with someone to run with, but this wasn’t supposed to be an all out race so that’s maybe not such a bad thing either.

One more tidbit: Pete passed me as I moved along with under a half mile left to go. Normally this wouldn’t be very noteworthy (since he can pass me pretty much whenever he wants), but in this case he’d done the full 10 miles and I’d only done 8. Not only did he pass me, but he did so looking comfortable and continuing to run faster than I could. Maybe one day…

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