City of Oaks, Week 7 Training

I love running when it's not summer! The weather this week has been amazing. Morning lows have been in the high 50's! I absolutely love it.

The week's training started off so-so. I don't have perfect stats on Tuesday's track run, since I forgot my watch, but I was able to borrow a stop watch from the gym. I had 6 x 1200's on the plan. After my fifth lap, I was done. I just wasn't feeling it. My lap times were 6:07, 6:09, 6:09, 6:29, and 6:23, so you can see I was sucking it the last two laps. The overall workout was 6.35 miles in 1:08:44, which is a 10:49 pace.

Thursday's run was great. I had 5 miles on the plan. I ran the first 4 miles with Bill. We ran at about a 10:50 pace if I remember correctly, but the last mile I had a good amount of energy, so I really pushed it. I ended up running 4.9 miles in 51:18, which is a 10:28 pace, so I really kicked it up that last mile.

Sunday's run was the longest I've had scheduled for myself on my training plan, which was 22 miles. I have one more 20 miler on the plan in a couple of weeks, which I may extend, but for now this is the longest. I ran the Ebenezer/Grayline/Reedy Creek/Edwards Mill 10.5 mile loop, plus a little more. I wanted this to be a good one. I decided to lap this run at the 5.5 mile marks, splitting it into 4 laps. I came out very strong. I finished the first lap in 59:39, which is a 10:51 pace. I finished the second lap in 59:41, which was a 10:51 pace, so the first half was very strong. The third lap was a respectable 1:00:39 and 11:02 pace. The last lap was understandably hard, but I still did pretty well. I finished it in 1:04:20, which is an 11:46 pace. I hit the typical wall at 20 miles, so I did take a few walk breaks, but I tried to limit them. The final numbers were: 4:04:18, which was an 11:07 pace. I'm totally stoked about the run. My hr rate numbers were 154 average and 182 max, but that last number is probably not accurate. The few times I felt like I was pushing my heart rate, I was usually in the upper 160's.

I can't believe it, but there is only 6 weeks to go...