November 1, 2009

My Longest Training Run :)

First off, shout out to my new friend Ravi!  Not sure why I didn't buy a Garmin sooner, but I absolutely love it.  No more having to spend ridiculous amounts of time tediously mapping out my running routes on walkjogrun - just one reason why I'm in love.

This morning I woke up with a massive headache and slept until about noon - even with the daylight savings.  I'll admit, I was a little under the weather from two nights of Halloween mayhem.  Here's me wearing part of Pete's "sooper aqua dump" costume which he wore for the Superhero run with Jeff and e_rod.  I think I look more like a Chia pet than a sooper aqua dump, though.

I decided last night before I knew I was going to feel like death when I woke up, that I wanted to run 10 miles today.  Come 4pm, I still didn't feel the greatest, but after a few encouraging tweets telling me to get off my butt and run, I headed out.

The first couple miles I felt pretty tired and my head was still pounding, but I was enjoying the scenery as the outline of Catalina was perfectly clear again.  By mile 4 my quads were starting to kill, and continued to hurt an abnormal amount until I stopped to stretch at mile 7.  I think they're a little exhausted from all of the biking I've been doing. While I stretched I ate some Skittles.  Yep, Skittles.  Taking advantage of all the leftover Halloween candy.  Some foggy mist-like stuff had also started to develop towards the pier - looked pretty cool.

Now I'm not sure if it was the stretching or the magical Skittles I ate but when I started running again I felt amazing - at least not like I had ran 7 miles already.  Nothing hurt, at all.  I picked up the pace some and by mile 9 I was thinking "maybe I'll just try to run 13.1 miles and beat my half marathon PR!"  I was all about it, until it became totally dark out and I kept encountering some interesting (in a bad way) people.  Not to mention I almost got hit by a skateboarder.  Kids.

I ended up finishing my run at Pete's house so I could pick up his truck to use tomorrow.  Made it 10.5 miles - furthest I've ever ran outside of a race!  And, I felt like I could run at least another 5 miles - crazy.  Sooper happy I made myself start and finish this run :)

I realized at mile 2 that I could keep track of my mile splits.  I've always kind of wondered what my splits are like during a long run because I feel like I'm pretty inconsistent - not too bad tho:

Mile 2 - 9:29
Mile 3 - 9:21
Mile 4 - 9:16
Mile 5 - 9:29
Mile 6 - 9:30
Mile 7 - 9:20
Mile 8 - 9:14 Sooper Skittles start to kick in! :-P
Mile 9 - 9:07
Mile 10 - 9:15
Last 0.5 - 9:10
Avg. 9:21 - w00t!