Its hard not to enjoy how much easier it feels to run fast at sea level.During my warm up on the River path (where every single Boston marathoner happens to be running in the days before the race) I couldn’t help but notice how easy it felt to be running 6:30 ish pace on my warm up. I saw Josh Cox run past going the other way. Didn’t realize he was running this weekend…or is he?After about 4 miles of warmup and stretching and strides, I decided to do a few miles of tempo at whatever pace felt good. I pretty quickly settled into a 5:45 pace that I felt I could sustain for quite a while, so I just went with that.In the last mile the tempo I passed Ryan Hall and wished him good luck on Monday. I finished the 3 miles in 17:12 (5:44 avg) feeling like it wasn’t all that hard, but it was just the right amount of effort for today. As a comparison, I ran that pace in January when in a 5K race, and that was an all out effort. Sea level, and some increased fitness are definitely the factors there. I’m still not sure if I can hold 5:28 for 5K at altitude, but I think I’ve got a good shot at it. I’m pretty sure its going to hurt pretty bad the last mile of that though.After I finished my tempo run and was stretching, Ryan caught back up to me so I introduced myself and we ended up running 3 or 4 miles together along the path and back into town.It was great chatting with him. He’s a very nice dude. We share a lot of beliefs and convictions both being Christians, and it was cool to relate to him on that. I commend him for being so straightforward and open about his beliefs.It was kind of interesting to be running with him in that setting where we were passing by dozens upon dozens of other runners, because everybody knows who Ryan Hall is, and tons of people give him greetings and wish him well. That can’t be too bad of a thing I guess. I sometimes think it could be kind of annoying to be famous, and so I’m glad I don’t have to deal with that…but seeing from that perspective, I could see how it could be very motivating to feel so much support from so many people wherever you go PM - we met up with Anika and Emily, two of Nan's former BYU teammates this evening, so they could get their final pre-marathon run in. I tagged along. We just ran easy, did 4 strides, then 4 x 1 minute at marathon race pace for Nan, which is like my 5K race pace. 5.5 more miles for the day. It was kind of cold and pretty windy out this evening. | 