Denouement

7.85 in abt 57 minutes.  Can't type much, our stuff is here from Utah!  Sent it off July 6th, arrived Oct 10th.  I hope it's not all smashed.  This unpacking will be the end of our transition to Hong Kong.  Item I am most excited for in the shipment:  Its a toss up between my metal fruit basket and our sign "Houses are made of bricks and beams.  Homes are made of love and dreams".  Given to me by Lupita (love you Pete) and made its way to HK.

AM: about 4.2 miles watchless

PM: met Aberdeen track group.  Did 5 x 1 1600m tempo interval, with 400m jogging rest.  No pacer this week plus windier so I knew I likely wouldn't be able to pull off another 5:33. I wanted to negative split still, but do it more even than last weeks 4x1 plus 1-1k (5:49, 5:44, 5:41, 5:33) or the prior 5x1 I did (5:56, 5:53, 5:47, 5:43, 5:38).  Today did:  5:43 (2:16 rest), 5:40 (2:41), 5:39 (2:53), 5:37 (3:01), 5:35.  The last one's splits were 84, 86, 85, 80.  Hard but successful and done.  

This week is a cutback week for miles, then a couple more weeks of high mileage then taper baby. 

easy 10k in 48:33.  Windy and lots of rain.  Core workout and weights. 5.75 pull ups :/

Finished Running Within yesterday and restarted it. 

AM: 6k at 4:55 ave pace.

PM: Warmed up 6k, then started 8k (5mile) tempo.  Wanted to start between 3:44-3:49, then drop from there and average 3:44 or better along the whole thing.  Had watch lapping at 5k intervals to see how I like that for the marathon.  First k was 3:44, so far so good, but pace started to creep up, by 2.5k I had to go to the bathroom, and I had to stop at 4.3k to prevent an incident, ave pace was 3:49 so far.  Took 1000m jog to nearest bathroom, then did 600m more to give a mile between the tempo intervals I am now doing.  So started again to do the remaining 3.7k.  Started first k feeling great, 3:40, but pace crept up again as at 2k or so I felt like I had to go to the bathroom AGAIN!  I ate mildly today but must have eaten too much in the afternoon. . .Fought through it and got 3:43 ave pace for that 3.7k.  It was a pretty lame workout overall, but still helpful to my fitness even though I didn't do the workout as planned and didn't quite hit my target paces.  It was quite humid  (drizzling of and on, so must have been 85-90% humidity) and I was sweating alot.  Cool down was 3.76 km in 5:06 ave pace.  

Ran shorter today in honor of cutback week. 8.75k in 4:37 ave pace.  Also core and weights. 

Adventure run today.  Woke up at 5:10.  Took metro then taxi, taxi went partway down my half marathon course and I dropped water then returned to start.  Warmed up 6k, then met Alexis at the start of my half marathon course in two weeks.  We ran the course.  The first hill starts about a k from the start (depending on where the start actually is) and it is steep.  In this first hill I am thinking already "this course is no good, I can't do this" but that first hill is the worst one.  The whole course is a rolly one.  Here is a link to the race on map my run, but it doesn't seem like the elevation chart. http://www.mapmyrun.com/routes/view/54223238, it seems much more rolly (other than the first hill).  I think I can race it except take that first hill kind of easy.  I'll wait to hear what my coach has to say about the whole thing.  I will post my k splits of the course just to show what it is like (tried to keep even effort, though hard to be perfect with that) 5:27, 4:31, 4:37, 5:04, 5:24, 4:58, 5:06, 4:10, 4:35, 4:53, 5:31, 4:33, 4:17, 4:18, 4:34, 4:47, 4:41, 4:40.  Only 18k of data since we didn't do an out and back on a couple of places.  Then Alexis needed a marathon pace 8k (4:10-4:15), so I did that with or behind her: 4:14, 4:10, 4:17, 4:13, 4:07, 4:14, 4:02, 4:34 (tempo stopped halfway through this one).  24 miles total.