looking forward to Sunday

Today was kind of a blur....I guess I'm focusing on Sunday's Army Run, so have got a bit of taper sluggishness going on. My legs felt sort of leaden and so my mind was jumping to all sorts of misconclusions. lol

Anyway, I jogged about 5 miles with the dog, and then speedwork polished off about 8. The jogging was a slog, but the speedwork went really well.

It was 2X 2K at race pace. There was nobody else running at what felt like a reasonable pace for me, so I just tried to remember what a good 1/2 pace felt like. I was a little faster than I'd expected, but it was nice and cool. And I definitely locked into a certain level of effort:

9:37 (7:44ish/mile)
9:36 (7:43ish/mile)

I was at 7:43-44 when Garmin spat out the mile split within each, too.

I'll go out at least a bit slower, of course....according to the race equivalency calculators I've looked at, that wouldn't be too far off my potential race pace, but I haven't been training for a 1/2. However, I figure that, if the weather is good and I don't go out too fast, I should be able to get in under 8:00/mile. I've run two 1/2s at 8:10/mile. High time to lose the 8.

The weather looks iffy right now...sunny with a high of 19. That route will cook up like kippers given half the chance, so I'm hoping that things will get overcast at least. Fingers crossed!

Ultimately, though, I'll be thinking of my husband when I run this thing, not only because I haven't seen him for 3 months and that's only a 1/4 of the way through, but also because he'll have far worse weather to contend with when he attempts to do his own version of the race, in Iraq. And, of course, he has so many other things to deal with too...not to trivialize those at all, but I have been focusing on the race as a sort of distraction, and I suspect he has too, time and circumstances permitting. There are many months to think about other things; in the meantime, we get to share the race somewhat. I was trying to think of a way to dedicate each mile to him. The simplest way would be to think of them as thus:

June 2008
July
Aug, etc...all the way to June 2009. The faster I can gut through each of those puppies, the sooner he comes home. yeah! I'll probably end up doing this.