Progression run of sorts. 6:45 am, 53-65° F, 62% humidity, winds calm, sunny, but with a fair amount of shade. I ran the roads from home this morning instead of driving to the trail in order to save time. I've got a visiting teaching brunch appointment at 10 am. When I run from my house, I typically run to the south and the east, which results in uphill for the first half of the run and down hill for the second half, generally speaking. This morning I decided to run west for a change. I ran down past my office and then back home and the little bit around the hood. This meant generally downhill for about 4 miles, up and down for 2 miles, then fairly significant uphill for 3 1/2 miles, downhill for 1 1/4, and then a steep uphill for 1/4. I told myself that I would just do the distance and bag the 20 minutes hard at the end that I was supposed to do because I would get plenty of hard in the 3/12 uphill miles from the end of mile 6 to 9.5. I did in fact get plenty of hard during those 3 1/2 miles, but then I hit the nice downhill for a mile and a quarter after that so I decided to try to speed up a bit. I tried to keep up the past I had reached on the downhill as I ran the full length of my hill sprint hill and onto my street at the very end (when I run hill sprints, I run less than half the length of that hill). With 0.05 to go, I started retching. Nothing was coming out because I hadn't eaten anything, but I was running down my street retching. Some lady was in front of her house with her dog. She must have thought I was crazy. So I guess I finished hard even though over all I was pretty pathetically slow. It was pretty hot by that point, so that probably contributed to my losing it. I've been trying to decide between running the ADT marathon on Labor Day and the TOU marathon 2 weeks later. On the run this morning I came up with a third option. Don't run either of them. If I run a marathon this Fall, I will certainly run it slower than my two previous marathons because I simply am not in the shape I was in when I trained for those marathons. And frankly the thought of long marathon training runs is somewhat daunting to me riight now. Maybe I'll just focus on the Deseret News 10K and then do the Georgetown Half in mid-August and just work on building mileage slowly and losing weight and then maybe look at a marathon next Spring. I think I prefer Spring marathons over Fall marathons because I'm better at training in the cold than in the heat. In other news, I get to meet Tracy and her family tonight! Yippee! I've got to go hurry and get showered now and go to brunch. AP: 10:03. Splits: 10:59, 10:16, 10:15, 9:58, 10:08, 9:49, 10:22, 10:14, 10:08, 9:31, 8:56.
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