Buttsweat Towel© season has begun

A muddy 8 miles, 8:31 pace.  A storm came through overnight (first rain I've seen in 5 months) and it was actually breezy and wet.  Everything is covered in mud.

My quads are still sore from Friday so I took it nice and easy.

It continued to rain most of the past 24 hours and it was a mess outside this morning.  What kind of a desert is this anyway?  Also, all vehicles on the road were collaborating with each other to force me into every mud puddle on base.  By the second mile my shoes were fully waterlogged.

I slogged through my planned workout anyway, which was 6 easy, 6 MP.  6 easy miles were @ 8:17 avg, then did the MP(ish) miles @ 7:35 avg.  7:56 AP for the run.  The heavy shoes notwithstanding, it felt pretty comfortable.

8:21 pace.

7:33 avg.

I hadn't done a sustained tempo in 4 weeks so I figured it was about that time.  Plan was 6 easy, then 5 fast - the first time I've tried to string together 5 tempo miles in a row.  My target for the fast miles was 7:00-7:10.

6 easy miles: 8:04 avg pace.  I kinda get psyched up mentally before a tough workout and end up doing my warmup miles too fast, but oh well.

5 tempo miles: 6:54 avg!  Splits were 7:05, 6:55, 6:51, 6:55, 6:45.

Pretty motivating workout for me, there have definitely been some fitness improvement spurts going on the past couple weeks.  After backing off in tempo mile 1 to hit my target, I decided to let myself run whatever felt right after that.  I hit that threshold point right around the end of mile 3 and it went from feeling great to feeling tough in about a 60-second span.  I pushed through the weakening legs though, to hold the pace for the last 2 uncomfortable miles.  Mental victory!  That's the most important kind for a dummy like me.

8:31 pace.  Not sore from yesterday, which is good news.

Tomorrow I'm gonna do a test -- run a half marathon at marathon pace (7:45) and see how it feels.  If it still feels nice and easy at the end, maybe I won't be nervous to start the actual marathon at that pace.

Well, as an experiment the run failed but it was a lot of fun.  I was trying to run it at 7:45 pace as a dry run for the marathon but ended up progessively getting faster.  After awhile I quit fighting it and just had fun with the run.

AP 7:26, 1:37:27 (unofficial PR).  Splits: 7:37, 7:34, 7:40, 7:32, 7:28, 7:27, 7:26, 7:24, 7:22, 7:23, 7:15, 7:21, 7:15, 0:44.

Really, it probably ended up being close to HM race pace.  If I was running it as an actual race from the beginning, I doubt it would've been a lot faster -- maybe a couple minutes, tops.  I didn't finish the last couple miles like I would've in a race, so as to have a short recovery, but the effort was pretty solid.

I think I still accomplished part of what I set out to do today because I don't think 7:45 is a crazy pace to start at for the race, seems very doable now.