Long Run

It was that time of the week again... time for the long run, I've been looking forward to this all week haha. It had been about 9 days since I did my last long run of 8 miles, and I decided to do 9 or 10 depending on how I was feeling. I was a little sore waking up after I did my 5-mile "pace" run yesterday. I ran most the pacer at a tad under 9:30 pace, I really have no idea what my target race pace is for the half or my goal times yet. Yesterday I was fine running that pace for the 5 miles... so maybe it's too conservative of a pace?? No clue, but I do know that 5 miles isn't 13 and change, so rather than die the last 2 miles I guess I'd rather do negative splits and finish strong. This may be my first half but it sure is hell isn't going to be my last, so I'm thinking at the very least setting the bar low will make it easier to PR next time.

Anyways, the weather was completely amazing for a long run... about 67 with sunshine. For the first mile or 2 I was really sore, with the usual cast of characters acting up (my achilles and shins). I've been trying to start slow on the runs and gradually build up the pace to my overall target pace for the run in a progressive fashion. Anyways, the soreness disappeared around mile 4, and I was feeling just fine. So I decided I'd do 10, except I couldn't find the 5 marker, and then I remembered Kevin told me he couldn't either. So I just ran a while, and definitely was probably about 5.3 miles when I turned around.

I wanted to run the second leg faster than the first. Every so often I would try to run at my tempo pace for about 2 minutes or so... I know I'm not supposed to do this on a long run, but oh well, it felt good. I finished the run (which I'm guessing was around 10.4) at around 1:41:00. I did the 2nd half about a minute faster than the first. I'm really starting to doubt some of the mile marker lengths on the bike path, so I'm just going to call it 10 miles in my log. I felt I could have ran another 5k after this, but it probably would have hurt a little. Hopefully, over the next month I can make some more gains.