T- minus

Well, I'm down to 9 and a half days until my next half-marathon. Conventional running wisdom tells me that 10 days is the cut off for any more training to change your performance on race day. Meaning that from here on out my goals are to keep up my endurance and not get injured. So even if I managed to find some hills, at this point it wouldn't make a difference.

So, instead of worrying about my lack of hill training, I did my six mile tempo run last night. I'd felt grumpy and irritable all day and seriously considered skipping my run. But, as my husband pointed out, the weather was relatively cool, it was cloudy, and it was lightly raining. All things that could make for a nice run.

Does anyone else feel silly wearing a visor or hat when it's cloudy and raining? I almost wore a bandanna instead but realized that the visor would keep the rain off my face. And it did. I honestly couldn't even tell it was raining while I was running.

I started off SLOOOOOOOW. I tend to start my tempo runs too fast, but in this case I did my warm-up mile in about 10:30. My Garmin is STILL acting up. It can't figure out my pace to save it's life. It's always under-estimating how fast I'm going. Which is why, although I was aiming to hit 9:45 minutes per mile after the warm-up, I ended up going much faster than that for three out of the four tempo miles.



And even on the cool-down mile! I swear to you, every time I looked at my Garmin it told me my pace was around 10:00 minutes per mile for that cool-down one. Yet, somehow I did even it faster than tempo.

I'm beginning to think my tempo pace needs to be adjusted. Next training cycle, for sure! This run felt challenging, but I still felt like I could have kept going if I had to at the end. I did have to pause for traffic a few times, though. I wish I could find a nice, long stretch that wasn't interrupted by intersections.

My blister didn't give me any issues. I carried my hand-held water bottle but didn't really drink out of it all that much. I didn't even wear my iPod. And when I got home, my husband was making tacos for dinner. Tacos rule.

Activity Route: -- Elev. Avg: 627 ft Location: Forest Park, IL Elev. Gain: +0 ft Date: 07/08/09 Up/Downhill: [+127/-127] Time: 06:22 PM Difficulty: 2.1 / 5.0   Weather: Light Rain   64 F temp; 69% humidity   64 F heat index; winds E 3 Performance Distance: 6.07 miles Time: 0:58:21 Speed: 6.2 mph Pace: 9' 37 /mi Calories: 628 Map   Elevation (ft)   Pace (min/mile)   Splits Mile Pace (min/mile) Speed (mph) Elevation Gain actual +/- avg actual +/- avg 1 10' 47 +1' 10 5.6 -0.7 +4 ft 2 9' 19 -0' 18 6.4 +0.2 +10 ft 3 9' 43 +0' 06 6.2 -0.1 -6 ft 4 9' 35 -0' 02 6.3 +0.0 +7 ft 5 9' 13 -0' 24 6.5 +0.3 -10 ft 6 9' 33 -0' 04 6.3 +0.0 -3 ft end 11' 40 +2' 03 5.1 -1.1 0 ft Versus average of 9' 37 min/mile

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