I feel like I've been slacking a bit recently in my workouts - partially because I'm in the middle of a taper for the marathon on Sunday, and partially because this past weekend I was in the DC area from Thursday night until Monday night for a wedding. In retrospect, I probably should have brought my running gear with me to get in at least something, but on the other hand, two full days of walking around, combined with a hotel bed that was as soft as plywood with a sheet, left me in an overall somewhat exhausted state.
I finally got around to getting a run in on Wednesday morning. I didn't want to do anything too awful long in an effort to keep the stress of mileage at a minimum, so I decided to do a loop near work that I figured would be somewhere around 7 miles. However, I wanted to keep the intensity up a bit. Unfortunately, I got to work before I realized that I left my HR strap at home. I originally thought about scrapping the run and heading home early to get it in, but it wasn't long before my afternoon started filling up and I realized that that plan wasn't going to work either. More important than anything that day was getting to yoga for the 7:30 class, so I had a hard stop. In the end, I decided to go on the run anyway, without the HR strap, figuring that I should have a decent idea of what intensity I'd be able to keep for the run based on feel. Sometimes that is a dangerous proposition, but in my experience, the times I've gotten in trouble the most when following that strategy is when I start out too fast. So, I'd just have to make sure to not do that.
The run ended up being just about 6.3 miles. I knew the initial part would be uphill, but I didn't realize it'd be a full 2.5 miles of uphill. I could tell I hadn't run in a while because I was laboring through it harder than I would have expected. I did a reasonable job at keeping the first mile slower, at just over 9 min - but I probably still overexerted on the 2nd mile, and been at more like 8:40 or so instead of 8:11. The next couple miles have consistently been fast miles when I've done this loop thanks to the gradual downhill, and 7:07 for mile 4 and 7:27 for mile 5 may be the fastest single mile and back-to-back miles I've done in a long time. That was kind of spur of the moment during the run - I knew some uphill was coming that I'd have to slow down for, but I decided to add in that little extra something for those two miles.
I guess we'll see on Sunday whether this run results in any carryover - I'm thinking that on Saturday I'll do a slow 3-5 miles as kind of a burn-in run, since going from Wednesday to Sunday with no running would probably result in a performance hit (albeit slight) during the full on Sunday.
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