A Long Workout

Did 14 miles today with 4 miles in the middle done with alternating
quarters between 5K pace and Marathon pace. I guess the goal of the
workout is to recover from the hard 5K quarters while still running at
marathon pace. Just forsimplicity sake, I decided 5K pace should 1:15
and marathon pace should be 1:30. I have a hard time doing math once I
get fatigued and these seemed like nice round numbers which was my
reason for going with them.

I started the run out with about a 5
mile warm-up and then did the 4 mile workout portion of the run. The
splits went like this: 1:17, 1:25, 1:17, 1:30, 1:16, 1:32, 1:17, 1:35,
1:17, 1:38, 1:17, 1:30, 1:17, 1:40, 1:20, 1:47.

So as you can
see, the hardest part of the workout wasn't necessarily the hard
portions of the run. It was the recovery at marathon pace. What I was
really struggling with was when I would hear myGarmin beep letting me know that the end of a quarter had arrived, my first instinct was to slow waaaay
down. Of course with this workout, that can't really happen. You can
slow down, but not really all that much. As I got grew more fatigued,
the harder it was not to run those "slow" quarters at a true recovery
pace. The hard portions were difficult, but it was a little easier to
stay on pace for whatever reason.

So after that was over I got to run 5 more miles as a cooldown
and it wasn't really pretty. As I mentioned before, I'm still not used
to doing these faster workouts so I was really hurting. I just wanted
to lay down and go to sleep. To be honest, I'm thinking of just
abandoning this whole "take a shot at sub 16" thing. It is becoming
fairly obvious to me that I've lost quite a bit of foot speed over the
past year and I don't think it will be recovered in the next few weeks.
I guess that should be expected since I have been training almostexclusively for the long stuff. You cannot serve two masters, and I've chosen my master and it's the marathon.