Change of Pace

Ha, shows what he knows... 40:14.

I'm not really sure where to primarily place the blame for not going under 40, but I don't want to beat myself up too much over what is still a healthy, competitive time that most people would be heavens-to-betsy thrilled with.

I started out planning to just stay with a teammate who has been running times comparable with mine lately, but I knew pretty quickly that the effort was a bit too much. I stayed pretty relaxed for the next couple miles after that and concentrated on running my own race, but the first big hill in the fourth mile just knocked me out. I recovered from that reasonably well, but ended up "sprinting" in my last .2 in 6:50 pace, so I couldn't have left much of anything on the course.

6:11 6:26 6:28 6:51 6:22 6:31 1:22

I guess my legs feel sort of dead from the beginning, but sometimes that feeling is more in your head than anything else. There was a lot of pollen in the air and I'm still coughing a bit from that, so maybe that was a factor. And I was out with friends for a birthday party until midnight last night, but I only had a couple of glasses of wine and still woke up naturally before 7 this morning, so I don't think that had much of an effect. Just a little bit of everything I guess, plus the random, unfathomable whims of this sport that sometimes decides that you've been using up more than your share of PRs lately and it's time to learn a little humility.

At any race, it was a great hard workout and I'll get over the 30 mile mark for this week, so maybe I can start feeling like a runner again after toying with the temptation to just stop training altogether for a while.