The Great Outdoors

Last night I convinced myself that I had to get outside today to knock out the 17 miler on the schedule. I haven't done a long run entirely outside in a few weeks, and I really didn't want to continue to put it off. The forecast was for temps to be in the in the teens in the midmorning, but not a ton of wind which would at least prevent the wind chills from dipping below 0. The other added bonus was that whatever wind that would be out would be blowing from the south which means it would be at my back for most of the run. Cold weather isn't so bad, as long as you don't have a nasty wind whipping through you the whole time. That can get painful.

Overall the run went pretty good. Since I run the first half of this run on city streets, the footing was a little tough at times, as there were long stretches of non-shoveled sidewalks, but once I hit the lake front path it was pretty smooth sailing the rest of the way. My overall pace was 6:41 and I finished feeling tired but not wiped out. My splits were pretty much all over the place for the first half since a lot of it depended on the footing, but for the second half I was pretty consistently in the mid 6:30s.

Normally if I put in a nice long marathon paced run, a interval session, and a 17 miler I'd be thinking that I finished off a pretty good week. However, with this crazy schedule, I still have some mile repeats and another long run on tap. Peaking ahead at the weeks coming up in the schedule I must say I'm a bit confused. I really don’t see any other weeks that have the kind of stacked up workouts as this first week. There are some tough workouts coming up, but nothing consistently tough as this week has been. That at least gives me some hope that if I can survive week 1, the rest of the schedule will be doable.