I was planning on swimming this morning but when I got there the lap pool was closed for cleaning. They had the splash pool open and it has lanes but that pool is heated and I feel like I'm swimming in a swamp, so I changed back into workout clothes and went upstairs. 5 miles on the elliptical, and then I limped around the gym for 45 minutes doing various machines. Saturdays race really has me perplexed, pretty much proves the fact that I have no idea what the heck I'm doing. I've been in much, much better shape before, over the last 3 weeks of "official" marathon training I haven't hit any of my key workouts, I had a terrible 5K just a week earlier yet somehow I went and ran a PR, and I didn't even feel especially great for this race, dealt with stomach cramps the first 4 miles and then had a bit of a crash the last 3. So how is it that I ended up running the fastest average pace I've ever ran in a race before? Was the course really that much faster? Is it simply because I wasn't able to run all summer so my body was better rested? Or did just having some crazy number like run a 1:15 in my mind give me enough motivation to run faster than I thought was possible? I did run a bit smarter than other races, I look at my previous 2 half marathons and I went off the line at a dead sprint close to 5:00/mile, this time I really tried to keep my pace at a level closer to where my average needed to be, even with the huge hill in the first mile. I don't really have a large pool of races to go off of, so setting PR's isn't a big surprise, if I ran a race every month I'm sure I'd have a much better idea of what I'm capable of but I've really only had 3 or 4 races that I can even compare too.
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