Training 2008-W14

Week 14 already! The marathon is at week 20, so lots of miles yet to log.

I started out the week sore from Sunday's run, taking Monday to rest and hitting the pool Tuesday for a relaxed 1000 yd plus a few lengths of rotation drills. Swimming felt great, and my breathing was comfortable throughout (nasal cilia: "ahem, except for when you practiced flip-turns").

On Wednesday I did a lunch run from the office: intervals of 1km, 2, 1, 1 with ~500m jogs in-between. At least, it was close to that. I used the garmin to measure the distances, but have it set statute measurement. I did just fine calculating metric distance and pace in my warmup and first interval, but after my legs starting suctioning available oxygen, my processing speed really slowed down. (I wonder what happens physiologically here -- it does seem real: that doing calculations is much more difficult while running quickly when (I presume) I'm running an oxygen deficit. Just lower PO2 up there?) Anyway, according to the GPS output I ended up doing something that looked like intervals after all.

My usual weekend long run group was heading to Strongsville for the CWRRC Spring Classic half marathon, either to volunteer or run. Joining them seemed easier than plotting our my own route (13 miles was on my training schedule anyway), so I pinned on a race number for my first legitimate HM. Conditions were awesome: about 40 when we started and a bit foggy, warming up to perhaps 50 and sunny over the course of the race. The course was a reasonably flat route through the Mill Stream Run metropark: mostly two laps of an out-and-back, so we got to share high-fives a great number of times with colleagues of a different pace.

I covered the first 2/3 of the distance alongside a colleague of similar pace, but then Chris (who had never run 13 miles before - ha!) went superman on us and sped up for a negative split, finishing at 1:46:01. I kept my pace, picking it up a little bit in the last mile (must.. beat.. girls..) to finish in 1:48:10. That's a PR for me (in the sense that I've also never run that fast in training), and a confidence-inspiring official 8:15/mile average, or 8:09 in GPS-land (which measured my run as 13.3, maybe accounting for starting so far back at the beginning, or perhaps I did a lot of drunken swerving after the water stops).