Sunday, August 12, 2007

Ten miler

It's 11 weeks to Marine Corps Marathon, I'm supposed to be doing 14-16 mile long runs about now, but this is all I had time for while the babysitter was here this weekend (while my husband is out of town).

I drove a couple miles to a nice residential area nearby and parked in the shade (in the center of the map below) and left my water and Gu and Clif Blox and salt in the car and went out for 4 loops on 3 different routes, stopping for refueling every ~2.5 miles. It was on the warm side, only 86*F but full sun and no wind at all.

I've set 12:00 min/mile as my cutoff between "jogging" and "running" (which is completely arbitrary, but anyway), so here's the breakdown for today:

At least the heart rate (and pace) looked a lot more consistent than this mess from a week ago. Oh, and I had no major knee problems, at least - it's been cranky but apparently babying it along with a knee wrap and taking lots of days off from running is keeping it more or less happy.

I'm starting to become doubtful that I can still pull off a sub-5 marathon in 11 weeks, but maybe I can get close. To go under 5 hours I'll need to run it more than 20 seconds per mile faster than my moving pace today, only over 26.2 miles instead of 10 and including water stops and hills and everything. Hmm. I'm just hoping for that autumn speed boost when it gets cooler, or it's going to be a really LONG day out there!! (Not to mention for the Annapolis and Disney triathlons before that). I need to get in a fast 14-16 miler next weekend or I'm going to be getting worried.

3 comments:

Herself, the GeekGirl said...

Egh, hot, windless days. Icky for running. Good job, though. I had a similar run not too long ago, but of course you have way more humidity. Egh.

jeanne said...

hey it was HOT out. let's hope for cooler weather at the MCM this year.

The Big Cheese said...

Holy crap. That would have killed me. And since when is a 12 min pace borderline jogging? That is a a full blown sprint for me on most days.