AM - 5 miles easy on campus. Another 10 hour night of sleep. I am racking these up lately! This afternoon is the "dress rehersal" half-marathon tempo. I basically got the idea for this workout from the Hanson's standard 26.2K @ MP, although I feel like 16 miles is a bit too long at altitude in terms of recovery... so for the sake of symmetry I scaled it back to 13.1. PM - 15 miles. The BIG tempo run, as described above, out on the frontage road between the airport and Saltair. I ran 13.1 miles in 1:09:16 (Average pace = 5:17 / mile). I am ready. The cake is done baking, and its out of the oven now. All that's left to do is let it cool off, then add some frosting and sprinkles over the next couple weeks. I really didn't want to crush this workout, just run it nice and controlled. My splits were: 5:21, 5:21, 5:20, 5:19, 5:18, 5:18, 5:13, 5:16, 5:17, 5:18, 5:18, 5:14, 5:13, :30. Very even effort. When I accidentally hit a faster mile in the middle, I was able to ease right back to the proper pace. As soon as I finished I drove back along the route and made sure Andrea and Emily B were doing OK, and drove alongside them as they ran their last couple miles. They had a great workout as well! We cooled down a mile in the dark together once they finished up. If you told me at the beginning of May that I'd run 1:09:16 in a half-marathon RACE this year, even on an aided course, I would have been pretty happy with that. To run that fast during a workout, without pushing it too hard, during a stretch of 140 mile weeks... well, that's just cool! And it makes me feel very confident about my ability to execute a great race in 3 weeks.
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