Sunday, August 25, 2013

One more down...4 more to go

I have completed another long run today and have 4 more to go before race day.  I have been on cloud nine since this morning for two reasons.  I ran 10 miles this morning and cut off 8 seconds off my average overall pace per mile!!!  I have been so tickled.  Don't know if you remember me saying in an earlier post that the farthest that I went in training last year was 8 so running 10 today was a huge deal to me. I am so excited and even more so looking forward to race day!!!

I did, however, have to get started earlier than most of the runners did.  The group was running 6 miles this morning and I needed to get in 10 so I started about 45 minutes before everyone else did.  Plan was to get 4 miles in and then run with the group, I only had time to get in a 5k so I had to run a little extra at the end.  That was hard in itself but I will get to that in a minute.  I did pretty good for the first part of the run and into the second round to start the six.  I was able to maintain a pretty good pace and was quite pleased with myself until I stopped at the first water station.

I paused my run to get a drink and didn't have anywhere to set my phone so I was like I will just stick it in my bra.  Bad idea!!!  At first, I thought that I lost my run altogether and that is just not even funny at all.  Turns out I ended the run so I was going to have to start over. It still saved my run but now my mile splits weren't going to be consistent and I was a little irritated.  I knew that if it didn't do that I would have beat my 10k time from the 4th of July race.  Oh well, it was already said and done and there wasn't anything I could do about it so I just tried my best to let it go.  I had 4.25 miles left to go when this happened and I needed to get it done so I could get home to get ready for church.

So I restart my running app and get my butt moving.  After about half a mile or more, we came to a hill that I did sprints up last Tuesday.  I am glad now that I did them because usually I get very intimidated by the hills which in turn makes me go up the hill slower.  Instead, I went full force up the hills and it felt good.  I think that has helped me with my pace and running with this group as well.  The last couple miles was the hardest.  I just had a hard time finding the motivation that I needed to keep moving forward so at times I was moving really slow and then there were times I felt great. 

Now we are down to the last mile and boy was it hard. I struggled so much during that last mile that I was ready to give up but knew that I needed to keep going because I needed to get my miles in today. The past 2 weeks I have been unable to get my miles in and today I was able to and I needed to take advantage of it so I pushed through that voice in my head saying, "It is okay to stop." I made it and adding my times together I had a great pace and like I said at the beginning of this post I took 8 seconds off of my overall pace from last week and even ran longer.  I am getting excited about next month's race and can't believe that I only have 4 more training runs to go and then the next weekend is race day!!! 

So until next time.

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