Doug's Running Thingy

Really satisfying long run this morning after sending Travis on his way back to UNF.  Mix of road and trail with all miles 60 to 75 seconds over marathon pace until last 2.5 or so, dropped down to mp and finished up 15 seconds faster than mp feeling strong.  Pretty sure thats the first 18 or longer run that I've averaged sub 9 minutes comfortably.

Wind chill of 12 this morning so I wimped out - plus I didn't go to sleep until after 1am with the silly Noles waiting until the last second to win National Champs!  Ran on the 18-yr old treadmill in the garage at lunch - it only creaked and complained a little bit.  Didn't realize until after I finished that it was set to a nice incline - not a fancy one with digital incline readout or nuttin.

Evening workout on the neighborhood roads.  1.5 m warmup then 20x200 with 200 jog rest and 1 m cooldown.  Really nice effort.  I do like this so much more than just running for an hour.  Hit them all between 46 and 48 seconds quite comfortably - kinda sorta 5K pace was the plan.

Cool drizzly six in the neighborhood this evening followed by striders.  No running tomorrow and then 30k race Saturday morning.  Dont really plan on "racing" it, but hope to just go out and run marathon pace as long as comfortable and then cruise in.

At the start line the race director advised that it was likely that lightning would make them call the race and come out and drag us off the course.  Out and back course on red clay roads... yep, rainy slippery sloppy red clay - big fun.  There were a couple thunderclaps before the 15K turnaround, but we kept at it.  Plan going in was to go out at 8 flat pace and then try to finish coming in closer to 7:45 pace.  Conditions and hills tweaked that a bit, but I made the 30K turnaround with an 8:07 average pace.  Rain lessened but a headwind kicked up for a couple miles headed back in, but was able to press a few closing miles down to 7:45 and better, with last 0.6 at 7:33 pace.  Garmin actually had me at 18.78 miles in 8:02 average what with all the weaving around to find good footing.  All in all I couldn't be more pleased given hills and conditions. Three weeks out from the marathon and a nearly marathon pace tough 19 miler without digging too deep at all.