Super weather for a long run!

Originally, I was going to do my long run on Saturday, but the weather prompted revision.  Yesterday was 20+ C, rainy, humid as f@@@, and today was 6-12 C, overcast, not humid, and windy.  Hmmm, do I want to feel sweat-logged and queasy, or not?

I started off on my own.  I'd thought about putting on a long-sleeved shirt, but today might be the last brisk day until fall.  I couldn't let it go to waste.  I had to embrace the chill.  As a consequence, I started off a bit faster than easy pace in order to warm up, and I just stayed at that level of effort.  I avoided the steeper hills but still had a bunch of large long ones.  9.5 miles in 1:22--definitely not my easy pace on hills. Oh, well!  I guess I could count it as a sub-marathon pace workout or something, a freebie thanks to the great weather.

And then I picked up the boys.  I'd planned an 8-mile loop for us as I was hoping to run 3 hrs/18 miles total, but I'd thought that my 9.5 mile route was ten miles.  17.5 miles is close enough.

We ended up running on a road that neither of us had been on before.  It's a private road that is accessible to the public, but on which horses have the right of way.  It goes by some very swanky horse farms and it's firmly-packed sand, which is pace-sucking but really really comfy.  I run on sand a ton here, but most of it is fluffy or torn up.  This was better than the best low-tide beach sand I've felt so far.  The texture was considerably less granular, too...it was ultra soft.  Like, foot spa soft. Even better, there are some more trails back there.  So that's a diversion for the future.

Our pace was slower thanks to the dog and the sand (about 2 miles total of sand or dirt), and we got home at just under 2:50.  17.55 miles.  I estimate about 15 miles of that was truly road.  I wore shoes that are so beat up that the uppers are beginning to fall apart--it's cool, though, because they didn't have much cushioning to begin with.  They felt fine except when I was going down one long hill in particular, but I also had to run on the shoulder for a bunch of it and the footing sucked there and threw me off my stride.  Perhaps alternating quickly between spongy ground and asphalt kind of threw off sensory feedback or something.   At any rate, I felt somewhat disgruntled during that stretch and I tried to bank that aggression for four significant hills I knew were still ahead of me.  Maybe that worked, maybe that didn't. 

My quads are a bit sore now, but I was expecting that.  I'm in smiling cow pose now and will be doing other stretches tonight.  So, not bad for my first long road run in ages.  There's a few more coming up.  The marathon is in five weeks.