Bret

It's funny, sometimes it's great with training partners but sometimes it's detrimental (as many things in life it goes a few ways). I follow the Hanson runners on Strava and I think some of the women just get pushed too hard when they aren't ready on longer runs (coming back from injury).

I do miss training partners for a few runs a week though even though I'm mostly solo to the bone. My first trainer partners had easy paces of about 6:30 pace and the other around 7:30 pace. I never ran easy runs much faster than 8:00-8:30 even though I was capable of it. Long runs were always interesting, especially when they would want to run at reasonable adult hours :-)

That humidity is a killer though. You can feel great until you don't. It's been extremely mild in Michigan this summer, though we don't have anything close to what you have even in the worst of times.

Yeah Jason - I know the prescription / and intended purpose of the long run is time on your feet at an aerobic effort - and clearly today I was pressing the envelope. But at the same time, perhaps because of my age and wanting to be able to get to the starting line uninjured, I have not done any mid-week workouts such as tempo or speed. So....in a way - I feel as though if I alternate long runs at aerobic effort with long-ish runs at tempo effort every other week, it may have a good training affect.

We shall see.