Its obvious in retrospect that even with not running last Saturday, I was pretty beat today. We were supposed to do a two mile warmup followed by eight miles at our goal marathon pace. This gave me my first difficulty - the guys I was running with were all shooting for an 8:15 pace, but I was going for 8:00… which should I do? Alex was good for my pace, but he was planning on peeling off after seven so that didn’t help me either. My other issue was that I’d managed to bruise my foot going through the mud at the end of the race yesterday; luckily, while it bugged me walking around, it was a complete non-issue when I was running.

I decided to put off my decision for the two mile warmup, hoping that it would resolve itself. In a way it did; I felt like complete crap. That made me decide that I would just run with the group rather than trying to excel today - especially since I have an extra month to go than many of these people aiming for Chicago. We started out fairly easy for the first two (and a bit) miles, then headed off at a faster pace for the last eight even. I was feeling really comfortable at first, but soon began to sweat as the combination of my recent races (10 miles in the last 4 days) and the weather (nasty) caught up with me.

Normally, when I do a pace run, I do it straight through with no rest stops. This time the crowd I was with was stopping every 2-3 miles. I’d like to say that I just pushed on through, but to be honest I was right there with them every time, grateful for the respite. My Garmin generated splits were pretty vague at one point - these are from MB, but we started running hard about two minutes into mile three so its a bit misleading:

Water stops were in miles three (beginning), four (end), six (end), and nine (beginning). The last one was at the RunTex Unimog underneath MoPac; by the time we got there out team was down to four people. I noticed that Carrie was still at the back when we started to head out, so I hung around for a few seconds and we ended up at the back of the ‘front of the pack,’ so to speak, about twenty seconds behind Mike. We did a pretty good pacing job over the last couple of miles, staying right around the group target of 8:15, but I couldn’t help but feel that the workout just wasn’t what I’d hoped for.

After we finished and I’d had a chance to dunk my head under the outdoor shower, we had time for four strides - the first two were spent loosening up, but the next two had some juice behind them. Afterwards Gilbert ran us through about 10 minutes of stretching and we called it a day.

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