Keep on Keepin' on.

I was doing so good updating this thing and then I stopped. Grr.

Did the standard recovery double of 9 miles in the morning and 6 miles at lunch on Friday. Things felt OK. Followed that up with 20 miles on Saturday morning at a 6:52 pace. This is the second consecutive early morning long run that I've done where I just didn't have it. It's not like I felt bad, I just had zero zip in my step. At this point, I'm not really running these long runs for speed so it's OK. Also, I've been doing some nicely paced 15-16 milers lately, so I guess it's OK if these are a little slow, but it's still a big perplexing. The run was pretty uneventful until the very end when the mayors dog, who often is out on the trail with me in the morning, ran up to me and BIT ME on the thigh. I didn't really hurt, but it did leave a mark and was kind of shocking. Anyway, my mouth hasn't started foaming yet, so I think I'm OK. Plus, it gave me a little adrenaline boost for the final 2 miles, which was kind of nice.

This week I've been trying to focus on getting healthy and strong. This weekend is Dances with Dirt - Gnawbone which is a 60ish mile 5 man relay race. It typically works out to around 10-15 miles per runner, broken up into 3 different segments. For the most part, the focus is on fun, but we should be pretty competitive this year, so I want to make sure that I can carry my weight. So I've been taking it somewhat easy this week.

Monday was a nicely paced 10 miler in 6:19. I didn't really have much in the way of expectations for this run, but I also wasn't going to hold myself back if I felt good, so I pretty much just cruised the whole way. It was a great day outside which helped. Tuesday was another general aerobic run totaling 9 miles at a 6:29 pace. Today I wanted to do one last fast workout before the weekend so I opted for the same 4 mile tempo run that I did last week. This week things were much more consistent than last week and I managed mile splits of 5:29, 5:32, 5:29, 5:24. Things started to get a little uncomfortable during that last mile, but that probably had something to do with the subconcious increase in pace more than anything. Anyway, with an overall average pace of 5:28, I'm pretty happy with the run. I think this is where I should be for this particular workout right now.