A Couple Miles

Last night was a lovely night for running. However, I only had an easy two-miler on the books since tonight is race night. Just a few easy miles to keep me not too stale.

I invited Jason to come with me. He's technically in week 2 of the Couch to 5K program. In typical husband fashion, however, he felt that the program was too slow, too complicated, too untested. How could it possibly work? I tried to tell him that many, many, MANY people have used the Couch to 5K program to start running and that I even used a modified version of it when I started. But, in the end, I let him choose the pace and the run/walk intervals on Wednesday evening's run.

After a few false starts (thanks Trinka Deu) we did a 5 minute warm-up walk and then did a few sets of 2 minutes running with 90 seconds of walking. We started out doing between 9:00 and 9:30 minutes per mile. That was a little fast for my easy two miles, but, hey, I was letting the husband guy set the pace. Shortly after the halfway point he declared that we should switch to 2 minutes of running and 2 minutes of walking. I also stated we should slow down the pace a little bit. How about to what you ran on the treadmill last week? 6.0 MPH? Okay, let's aim for 10:00 minutes per mile.

It was good practice for me to attempt to help someone hold pace. I actually manged it for a short period of time. Go me!

On the way home we stopped at the dog park to let Trinka Deu socialize and then ran the rest of the way home.

Yep, we got in 2 miles at an average 11:37 minutes per mile. See, nice and easy! I think this also counts as a "heat" workout, too, since the air temperature was a lovely 83^oF.

And, by the time you read this, I'll be putting in a full day of work and then suiting up to run the Chase Corporate Challenge. If you'll be there, look for the girl in black shorts with a white stripe on the sides, a navy blue t-shirt, and a white visor hanging around the G6 tent. If you won't be there, think of me at 7:10 PM Central Time. That's race start. Also, I've decided the following:

A Goal: Under 31 minutes (that's an 8:51 minute per mile pace)
B Goal: 31:30 minutes (that's a 9:00 pace)
C Goal: Under 35 minutes (10:00 pace)

Since there will be 20,000 or so runners (many of which may have never run a race before), I expect I will be dodging people the entire time. Plus, it does not appear that this race is chip timed! I read something about how we have to note and report our own race time? So, in all honesty, I'd be perfectly happy with Goal C. But I'm still going to try for A! And I'll go by whatever my Garmin says for my time. Sound good?