Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Sammamish River Trail 7 Miles

Current Mile total: 976.25 miles

Ran with Footzone club. We were supposed to do a 1 mile warm up, then 7 1 mile repeats with 1 minute of rest in between. It was hot and by break #2 the group decided they only wanted to do 5 repeats. I was a little disappointed because I was feeling good and was looking forward to the challenge. Everyone talks about this workout as being so difficult. You're suppose to run it at a 5k-10k race pace but due to the heat we all decided that the half marathon pace would be best. So I figured I'd run a 7 min mile. This is actually faster than my best half marathon pace but its been a while and my speed has improved. So I ran 7 min miles. And I realized immediately that it was a nice conservative speed for me. Heidi and Jim were naturally in front of me for the first 3 repeats but I could tell they were tiring fast. But I still felt great. By the 4th repeat I was running past them and the first to finish. Yet I was still doing my 7 min mile, not going faster. So on the last repeat I actually did try a little harder as we should have done 2 more and I finished with a 6:30 min mile and while my breath was short, my legs felt good. I was a good 30 secs ahead of Heidi and much more with the rest of the team. I don't know if it was that I've lived in warmer climates for the last 14 years or just all the endurance running I've been doing but I was able to run normally when all the others were having trouble. It did feel good at any rate to run so strongly. My legs have been heavy for weeks and I finally feel as though they're well rested and I'm ready to tackle more mountains. Good thing too as this weekend I'll be running on both Saturday and Sunday, Snoqualmie Pass and Cougar Mountain.
I should also finally reach the 1000 mile marker on my current mile total.

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