I ran my last double digit run before next week's race today. Since my 'training' has been all of 4 days, this is not anything special. But I wanted to feel confident about hitting double digits in a decent time so I figured today would be do or die time. I putzed around the house for a long time before I decided it was time to go running. I drank my coffee, ate some breakfast, lingered over the newspaper (I did all the puzzles--even the mini sodoku), ate breakfast 2.0, 'researched' some mountain house properties, and finally put my running gear on.
I checked my iPod when I was getting my water bottle together and it showed 3/4 of battery life. Cool. When I got to the Greenway and put on said iPod, it was completely out of juice. Doh! Hmm...this was not to the plan. I really, really, really prefer to run with music (or a friend), so I decided to just throw all I know about racing dress rehearsals out the window and strapped my giant Android phone to my arm using my iPod wrist band. If it started to slip, I could always tuck it in my sweaty sports bra or ughhhhhhhhhh, hold it. I took my chances and strapped that bad boy in tight.
And off she ran.
I felt light on my feet and had to consciously slow myself down the first few miles so that the last few wouldn't hurt. When I passed the first mile marker, I saw 7:43 flash as my first lap. Oopsy. So I dialed back my speed and decided to look again at the 1.5 mark. Still too fast. I slowed waaaaaay down. Mile 2: 7:56. I can't decide whether to be annoyed with myself for running too fast (which could be regretful on mile 10) or elated that what felt slowish was actually fast.
Miles 3 and 4 I tried to keep that same weird cadence. 7:56 and 7:44. I stopped and took a picture after mile 4 so I plowed through mile 5 with my 30 second break. 7:39. After that, I said to hell with trying to even come close to the planned 8:15 pace. I am just going to run like the giddy goober that I am. I took a couple of more pictures on the way back and that just added fuel to the fire. 7:41 for mile 6, 7:34, 7:30, 7:25, and for that last mile, a sweet lil' 7:07.
I am trying to not feel super confident going into the race with these splits because of 2 reasons. 1) Who starts 'training' 13 days before a race and expects it to be awesome? 2) The hills, the hills, the hills that I haven't been running on. If anything will cause me to crash and burn on race day, it will be the hills. So best not to get too big for my britches. I will just try to enjoy the race for the first 10 miles and then see what sort of 5K speed I can lay down. If there is no gas in the tank, no worries--this is not a race for great expectations and I'm okay with that.
Because I never bring my phone/camera with me on a run, I decided to snap a few pictures of where I spend a few hours of my week. As I finished my run, I decided that having my giant phone strapped to my arm actually was pretty awesome...
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