Well… I know that I said that I wasn’t goint to run today… but I did anyway.  You see, at lunch today Thon offered to run his 3 mile hill loop with me this evening.  Naturally I stuck to the gameplan and told him that I wasn’t running until Saturday.  Then time passed.  The day continued delightful.  More time passed.  Before I could stop myself I was calling and asking if the offer had expired.

 It hadn’t.  So we ran the loop together and, quite frankly, I’m very glad that we did.  The last time that I ran this course was two weeks ago on Valentine’s Day, where my splits were 10:06, 9:30, and 8:03.  Today’s splits were 10:14, 9:12, and 7:38, a significant improvement on the hilly sections.  The last leg is only .86 miles, so that works out to a 9:21 pace last time and an 8:52 today.  Last time was also 30 degrees cooler and a much nicer 65% humidity, as opposed to today’s rasping 14%.

Yeah, MotionBased gives me too much data to look at.

My form seems to be getting better overall, too.  It still gets sloppy after a hard exertion, like climbing the 7th street hill or doing a final 6:00 pace push at the end, but as long as its progressing I don’t suppose I mind too much.  My HR was substantially lower today as well - it stayed in the 150s for the first mile and a half (with a few exceptions on hill pushes), and 2 weeks ago it never dipped below 160 after the first quarter mile.  Mile 2 was similar; I was recovering down to 160 this time as opposed to 170 last time.  Again, not where I want it to be, but a solid gain.

Finally, I have to say that was great having Thon out there to push me today.  I would have been incredibly likely to walk the final hill coming up the alley between 9th and 10th without knowing that he was there - and he helped me to keep the speed up on Windsor as well heading back to the start.  So “Thanks,” man.  I owe you some pacing when I’m back up to speed.

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