follow the leader

Well, I was of two minds (one vacuous, lol) about running this morning with the group. I wouldn't have considered it at all, except that I left gazelle #1 alone in the wilderness last Sunday and felt a little guilty about that. LOL. Plus, the route looked neat.

I slept a LOT and got up, didn't feel stiff, so it was on.

The pace was faster than expected, because we ended up behind somebody even faster, but he knew an even better route, a really interesting route, and so I had to keep up. It wasn't hard to, anyway, because we were running on this litle dirt path by the river, sometimes through tall grasses, behind buildings, etc, etc...I'd never been there before and it was exhilirating. I really miss running on that sort of surface--it wasn't a paved or even un-paved bike path, it was a true running trail. Single track. It was totally primeval....lol....well, not really. Pretend there was an apocalypse, though, and infrastructure collapsed, and survivors had to scramble through re-emerging nature amid crumbling concrete and rusted rebar and so forth...well, this is the sort of thing we'd be hustling on, this small path engineered by foot traffic.

It was so much fun. I didn't really know where I was...yeah, I vaguely knew which way to get back home, but I didn't really know how far I was going, how fast--all I had to do was follow. And it felt surprisingly easy. We were going right around 8:00/mile, and it was fine....for about 13-14 K, and then we were on boring roads again and suddenly my quads had had enough.

I elected not to do the loop around the Farm; instead, I jogged back along the Canal. Counting running to the meeting spot, I ran about 14.67 miles, which puts me close to 60K these past 2 days. I should feel worse than I do, but I think all these miles are starting to build up and stuff is finally getting less hard. Not speedwork--I'm definitely getting sluggish with that--but just miles and miles in general.

It was a big confidence boost, too. We were going faster than my marathon pace. So, when I'm get to the tired point, I will have no excuse to go slower. LOL

Yoga tonight, and I doubt I'll run Monday or Tuesday: heavy work days, both of them.