You know those days when you just feel things falling in place? Well, last night’s run was one of those runs. Plan was 8 miles, with 2 easy, 4 faster (going by feel, but had thoughts of sub-8:30pace in mind), and then 2 easy to get back home. I was feeling tired, and not really in the mood to run, so I put on some music to distract me til I found my zone. And I found it –

My easy warm up was a comfy 9 pace, and then I managed sub-8 for the first hard mile! Good motivation came first when I spotted a guy ahead who looked like he shouldn’t be able to run a 10 min mile but that I wasn’t catching — I had to catch up just to see when I was by him what speed he was at (7:20ish)! Wow that was a hard mile, I thought. Huh, wonder if I can do sub-8 for another. So I did. Then came the thoughts of doing all 4 at that pace! I knew the outbound direction was a bit tougher, so I thought I could, but I was feeling the pace! My legs were starting to burn a bit. Made it though My 4 fast miles were 7:52, 7:56, 7:36, and 7:29!

Feeling a bit tired, I looked down and saw my total time. My 10k PR in a race is 53:07, and while I have come close to it in training, I was way under it! So I kept up a good pace for another .2 miles, hitting 10k in 50:30!!

Content, I stopped checking my watch, and just let autopilot take over. Yet in an hour I was just over 7.3 miles!! That’s my farthest in an hour EVER! And parts were not at all pushing it.

So in the afternoon run I almost skipped and just played by ear, I stayed under 8 min pace for the main set, PRed 10k and hour. Yeah, I’ll have some more of those training theories now Marky!

This entry was posted on Friday, March 14th, 2008 at 12:27 pm and is filed under marky, running. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.