Today was the last day the temple was open for over six months. That is a huge bummer. It was a very rainy day, you could hear the rain in the temple. It was still raining when I started my run, so I put my key inside one of my gloves. My original plan had been to chill on the way out and make it a "barn burner" on the way back, but by the time I saw one of my old teammates a mile or two in, I could tell that I wasn't going to hold back on the way out. The rain went from a heavy drizzle to a light drizzle and stopped around the turnaround on the road by pine point. At the halfway, I took my GU. It was interesting, I was not surprised to not be aerobically challenged by the pace, but I knew I was a ticking time bomb before "the wheels came off", as so often happens. I haven't blitzed a long run in a while so I was just expecting this to happen. But mile after mile on the back end, it didn't. As the miles ticked by, I just felt stronger, knowing that if I did start to feel bad, it wouldn't have very long to affect me. Now, I was going faster than normal on the back end, but still enjoying it more. Crazy. So I ended up hitting 5:35 pace, my fastest long run of all time!!! I've repeatedly been in the ~5:45 range, but never below 5:43 or so as I recall. I guess the combination of the Gateway, where I tend to run really fast, with the magic of the week after Get in Gear (when I ran a fast LR last year) was enough to do it for me. I'm very pleased and wish I could say this means I am super fit. It's not a bad sign, but I really do feel like it had everything to do with the odd fact that I just didn't run out of gas. Somehow my glycogen was fine. No idea why. Look at these splits! 5:44, 5:53, 5:37, 5:40, 5:39, 5:36, 5:46, 5:46, 5:37, 5:36, 5:38, 5:31, 5:31, 5:31, 5:23, 5:17. 3:47 and 3:38 for the first and last parts, and about 4:30 each way in the middle without a mile marker. Crazy that I just ran 19 miles faster than my marathon pace. I definitely should be able to PR at that distance!
Met a random biker at Pine Point who was talking about all these tiny little towns that I have never heard of lol.
| 