Reflections on 8 Miles

This morning I woke up moving very slowly and feeling tight in all my muscles, but especially in my adductor, which was causing me some frustration last week.  I would have been very happy heading back to bed and sleeping for a few more hours, but I knew my running buddy Brooke was waiting for me.  Being felt that you are held accountable for your runs always helps on mornings like this.  The plan was to run just 8 miles because this is a recovery week so the milage goes down.  Even though the long run milage is low, this is when we practice running race pace.  So for the first 4 miles we were going to keep it nice and easy and then pick it up for the last 4 to a 9:13 pace.  Brooke and I both have the same goal to run our half in under 2 hours, in order to do it we need to keep a 9:13 pace for 13.1 miles.  So here's how the morning went...

Mile 1 - 10:12
Mile 2 - 10:08
Mile 3 - 10:11

These first three miles Brooke and I took time to catch up and discuss the fact that we are working on saving money.  We weren't really paying attention to our pace other than knowing that we needed to use these miles as a warm-up.  After about the first half mile I wasn't feeling nearly as stiff and felt like I could nail this run.  The miles went by fast and the time to catch up was nice because it has been a few weeks since we had seen each other.

Mile 4 - 9:06

After the first 3 miles I was feeling really good and unintentionally ran in-front of Brooke and before I knew it I was running at a 9:06 pace.  After mile 4 we took a quick break, drank some water, had a chew and decided for the next 4 miles we would stay together, but pick it up 15 seconds every mile until we got to our race pace.

Mile 5 - 9:26
Mile 6 - 8:58

The next two miles we pushed it more than we thought, but we were feeling really strong.  Around mile 5.5, I started to feel dehydrated so I wanted to break again for a water stop at mile 6.  There we talked about slowing down to about a 9:10 pace.

Mile 7 - 8:46
Mile 8 - 9:29

Once we got back on the trail though we just took each step in stride.  We started off together, but then I slowed down after mile 7 and let Brooke run about 100 feet ahead.  I think that when we started working on race pace today we were feeling so good that we forgot that we still had more miles ahead of us.  Although we seem to be doing great with pace, I think we need to be aware that pushing too fast too soon can slow us down in the end.  Overall though, it was a great run, with great company and both of us walked away feeling proud that in just over a month we have really improved in not just our race pace, but also in our own confidence that we can rock this race in a little over a month and a half.

8 miles - 1:16:19
Average Pace - 9:32
I was also really excited that 5 of the 8 miles I ran were under a 9:30 pace and I was only planning on doing 4 miles faster than that!