Not Bad

I was under the assumption that after yesterday's two easy runs, I would wake up this morning feeling great with tons of energy and a spring in my step. As you can probably guess by now, it didn't happen. As I was walking to the train this morning, I could tell that the legs just weren't right. I've never really been one to experience the delayed soreness from a workout, so since I didn't feel much of anything yesterday from my mile repeat workout, I was surprised to feel it today. Regardless the schedule called for 12 w/6 @ 36:00 so I was gonna give it a go. It wasn't the most daunting workout in the world and with a half marathon coming up on Sunday I really wanted to have two easy days before it to give the legs as much of a break as possible.

I have a route from work that is about 12 miles with a nice 8 miles on the lakefront path. I've been doing most of my longer tempo runs on that route so I decided this would be a good one to do this run on as well. It's kind of my "tough it up" route, where I kind of equate it with being in some discomfort. I really wanted to stick as close to 6 minute pace as possible on this run though. No sense making things harder than they needed to be. So I hit the first mile dead on 6 minutes. During the two mile mark I go under a bridge and I lost the Garmin reception. When the reception came back it showed me at 12:15 at mile 2. I sped up to try and get back on track and when I came through at mile 3, the Garmin had corrected itself (without telling me), so the 5:37 split for mile 3 wasn't completely necessary (mile 2 wound up being dead on 12:00 I found out after the fact).

After that most of the splits were around 5:55. I just don't have enough confidence in my pacing ability to stick that close to my goal pace. I need some cushion. After 6 miles, I was still feeling relatively good, so I just took the tempo portion out to 8 miles and cruised home. The pace for the 8 miles was 5:54 which wouldn't have been as fast without the quick mile 3, so I'll say mission accomplished.

Now the goal for tomorrow and Saturday is recovery and rest. I'm not sure what to expect on Sunday for the half marathon, but I'd love to give myself a little confidence booster heading into the final 6 weeks before Chicago.