faster with age

     My plan this morning was to run a half marathon at marathon pace. I was worried about the wind because it has been very windy and we are supposed top be getting more storms today. The temperature was 36 with no wind this morning. Perfect. My wife dropped me off 15 miles down the road and I started off with 2 miles warm up at 7:49 pace. My plan was to start out in the 6:50 to 7:00 range for the first half of the run and see how I felt. I was hoping I would feel good enough to pick the pace up a bit more toward the end. I started out how I wanted with my first 8 miles all between 6:51 and 6:58 depending on how much up or down hill there was in each mile with the exception of mile 6 which was all uphill I ran a 7:12. At about mile 7 I started to get a bit of a headwind which got a lot worse at mile 8. My pace slowed to as much as 7:10 on some of the next miles so I tried not to worry to much about the pace and just maintain the effort and heart rate. My overall pace for the run was quickly going backward and by the time I had 3 miles to go it had gone above 7 min pace. I picked it up on the last mile to see if I could get it back under 7:00 and ran a 6:45 last mile into the wind and 40 second last .1 and just passed the 7:00 min guy in the last 1/4 mile. finished in 1:31:35, 6:59/mile average pace. I was planning to try and run around 1:30. If you figure in the headwind I probably came close but this run took a lot more effort than I had hopped. My actual MP would definitely be much slower than that right now. I felt pretty spent by the end. I ran 1 more cool down mile at the end to make the total for the run 16 miles. Hopefully with exactly 4 weeks until Boston I can stay healthy and improve my fitness a bit more.