Sunday, March 20, 2011

A tale of two runs

It wasn't the best of runs; it wasn't the worst of runs. Mainly, it was a long run after a hard race the day before. All you need to know can be summed up with two numbers:

Miles 1-9: 8:23 pace
Miles 10-18: 9:08 pace

Chad and I had committed to an 18-miler today. This was after I had run a hard 10K race yesterday—a total of 9 miles if you count the warm-up and cool-down. I wasn't expecting I'd be fast. Indeed, I would have settled for a 9-minute pace for the whole run. But when 9 people show up for the Sunday long run, there's a strong incentive to run faster than you probably should. So we took off at an 8:10 pace on a very hilly Grey Road. I was pooped by the time we got up the first major hill, just 3 miles in. Chad and I managed to keep up the aggressive pace for another 6 miles, even though we were still falling behind the rest of the runners in the group. They were only doing 13, though, so they could afford to keep up the pace.

After a break at Mile 10, we put up a good fight for a while, running 8:40-ish splits, but after Mile 13 our splits got progressively slower: 9:22, 9:12, 9:05, 9:44. Finally on the last mile I did all I could to pick the pace up again, 9:13. I jogged in the last third of a mile to our meeting point, totally sapped, and looking forward to a day of rest tomorrow.

Details of the workout are below.


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