Tired Dead Legs But a Milestone Nonetheless

Today's 8.3 mile run - it wasn't easy, it wasn't fun, but it WAS - it existed - which is a new thing for me in the whole scheme of things.


Let me explain. The past week's workouts went like this...

• Saturday, Dec. 26 - 5 miles - half marathon goal pace with hard fast mile long kick at the end at 1 1/2 min/mi faster than rest of pace
• Sunday, Dec. 27 - 5 miles - half marathon goal pace with hard fast 1/2 mile kick at the end at a pace about 2 min faster per mi than typical pace
• Wednesday, Dec. 30 - 7 miles - half marathon goal pace - PRed my 10K time, great splits, felt super strong.

So I was already at 17 miles in the week, which is a lot for me, and fairly hard, fast runs for me.. I could have not run today or run just a couple miles. But instead I set out on this run with Sarah with the goal to do between 7 and 10 miles. A few miles in we settled on 8 because Sarah had somewhere she needed to be at a certain time.

About 4 miles in, I just started to drag. Me, who enjoys my rest days and typically keeps low weekly mileage, suddenly understood what tired, dead, overused legs feel like!

We ran/walked and towards the very end, we just plain walked. But that was fine. I still got the miles in. So 8.3 miles done. Total mileage for this last week was 25.3 miles.

To put this in perspective, this week's mileage was... more than my March 2009 MONTH's mileage, about equal to my May 2009 MONTH's mileage, and about half of my total December 2009 MONTHLY mileage. A great start to 2010!

Total Time: 1:48:39
Splits:
Mile 1 - 11:16
Mile 2 - 11:23
Mile 3 - 11:32
Mile 4 - 11:30
Mile 5 - 11:52
Mile 6 - 13:17
Mile 7 - 13:06
Mile 8 - 18:40
Last 0.3 mi - 19:56