Yesterday I went on my "long" run for the week. Four miles, and I was very happy to have the company of at least part of my running group: Tall Paul, Grace, and Dana. Always good company! I was smart this week and fueled and hydrated before I left the house, and I'm sure that made a difference.
Grace pushed us to go faster than I would have been inclined to without her, and we finished in about 54:30 (there were some discrepancies in the time, but it was somewhere around there), which is in the neighborhood of 13:30 per mile. I was very happy about this! My goal was to keep it under 15:00 and I more than exceeded that. This is probably the slowest I would want to be for the marathon, because that would take 6 hours to finish. We're aiming for a 5 hour finish time, so I'll need to up the pace a little more, but I still have lots of time to ramp up.
Another thing that may have helped our pace was that we dropped to 1:45 for the walk intervals instead of 2 minutes. This week we go to 2:30 run/1:30 walk, which is the hardest intervals I've done to date, so it was a way of sort of easing into that. I was nervous doing that on a long run, but I hardly noticed the 15 seconds difference. Running 2:30 will be a little hard at first since the last 15 seconds I'm usually ready to stop, but at least I have some shorter runs at the nice, flat park to get used to it before we do it on a long one again.
Anyway, so I felt good about this week's run. I was tired of course and I am pretty sore today, although that might have had more to do with ballet class on Saturday than the run. It feels really good to see my progress and know I'm improving.
Total for 100 Mile Summer: 17 miles
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