8.26.2006

Grueling 8.5

It took me until Saturday afternoon to feel "normal" again after Tuesday night's marathon school board meeting. A hot topic drew a lot of citizen speakers and the 34 each had five minutes to say their peace. That was no less than 3 hours of it.

Anyway Thursday morning's call for 8 miles came before Saturday afternoon and I did persevere; but it was ugly. I had half a bagel and no Gu when I left at 6 a.m. I had a nice route picked out that took me downtown where I ran into Chris and Jack of my Sunday morning long-run gang. We teamed up to go a couple miles and catch up. Thank goodness they were going slowly.

In the interest of paying pennance for not seeing them since June I detoured from my route to hang with them an extra half mile. It turned my 8 into 8.5. I fit a few water stops in along the way but it was gruesome running. The humidity was in full bloom and the temps were about 80F.

I slipped in a few "water stop" practices in the last mile and got home barely in time to shower, change and drive to work. My time was a penguinesque 1:32 for a near-11 minute mile pace. Even with that factored into my Parrot Predictor the deranged Parrot predicts I'll run a marathon in 4:17. It tried to make me believe that last time too and it near killed me.

We'll see. We'll see.

Tomorrow calls for 17 miles. That will take some planning tonight. I also need to sign up for the New Haven 20K tonight, plus pack. I leave for Rhode Island on Wednesday night. Yeah!! The forecast is a '9' with highs in the mid 70s, low around 60 and sunny weather. How great is that?

6 comments:

[rich] said...

Hope you have a good run - I've got to drag myself out of the bed early to get 13-14 miles done before we got out tomorrow. It's only 2 weeks before my Half and I need to convince myself that I can make it :-)

Rae said...

Good luck on the long run!! Mid 70s sounds heavenly!

Rhea said...

You're logging some pretty good mileage there - 8.5 today and 17 tomorrow?!

Tomorrow I'm going to run 16-17 miles. But today I did nothing - just recovered from a late-night cross-country flight and then a 2-hour plus drive into the Sierras. I arrived at my destination at 3:30 am PST this morning - right about the time my marathon training group on the east coast was gearing up for their 16-17 mile long run ...

21st Century Mom said...

RI sounds much nicer than FL right now. And just about anything beats a school board meeting full of angry parents. Enjoy your vacation.

Michelle said...

I hate humididty. No GU but did you have your bodyglide? Can't wait for next Monday!

Iron Jayhawk said...

OOoooh...I'd love to get some weather in the 60's and 70's right now.

Chicago is just too damn humid to function these days. Blech.