Sunday morning was nothing like the stormy Thursday. The sky was a pleasant blue, tarnished by the smoke from the burning substation off in the distance. We lost power during the storm Thursday (yeah… the one I was out running in). Then on Saturday the date-night movie was ruined by the power going out again, this time while we were in the movie theater. The cause of the outage was a sub-station that caught fire and exploded. On Sunday when I headed out for my 18 mile run, the station was still burning.
One lap around the Hillsboro airport is almost exactly 6 miles. Very handy for an 18 mile run. I parked my car on a little dead-end road near the airport and trotted out. It was cold (around 35 degrees) but pleasant when dressed right. Not much wind and overall just a wonderful day.
The first lap flew by. I stopped at the car and drank some fluids, ate a few slices of orange and chewed a bit on a powerbar and headed around again. After the second pit stop it was a bit harder to get moving again. Normally on my runs I only stop if I am at an Intersection, but I have to say after the second lap where I actually sat down, it was hard to get moving again. I felt like a train trying to build up some steam.
Everything felt pretty good until about mile 17. Then I started to hurt. Nothing in particular… just everything. I was trying very hard to hold on to 9 minute miles, and it appeared I was on my way. But after mile 17, I just wanted to finish… I didn’t care whether it was a 15 minute mile. When my watch beeped that I was done, I hit the stop button and my pace came up.
Exactly... 9 Minute miles.
For a split second I felt emotional and did the little suck of wind you hear when people are fighting crying during a sad movie. Of course, being a man I quickly beat that piece of emotion back into the closet when it belongs and threw the key away again. =) It was quite an effort to keep that pace, especially at the end. The goal I set for myself long before I knew better, was under 4 hours. If I kept the 18 mile pace I’d be at 3:54. The only problem is that… well… I know at this point I could not keep that pace up. I do have another 4 months of training though.
1 comment:
That was an awesome finish. Four months to the big day and I bet your going to do better then you expect. Much props for finishing the last mile at a nine minute pace! P.S. I have changed my blog link to http://runforthebean.blogspot.com/! Thanks again for all your kind words and hope you have a wonderful Christmas!
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