Six Miles

We have moved where we have been running from the school complex to the fairgrounds park. We have a nice, level 1.5 mile loop.

Since one of my kids has twilight camp this week, I was not able to meet Candi and Samantha at our regular time to run. I decided to run on my own and the other two would be there by my final lap.

A friend of mine said I probably wasn't pushing myself as much as I could when doing my training runs. Tonight, I decided to try pushing myself a bit.

My first half mile, I ran harder than I normally do (based this on my breathing and the "Ohmygosh! I am gonna die!" feeling). I went back to my comfortable running pace but each time I hit a shade spot, I would lengthen my stride just a bit for maybe .2 of a mile (or until I hit the "gonna die!" spot) I did this for my entire 10K. I normally go faster my last .2 of the run anyway but today I got a stitch so was only able to pick up the last .10 mile (the route I run is marked every .10 miles)

Given that I started at 6;15 pm, the sun was still up and it was darn hot even though it was only 83 out. I "cheated" and checked my stopwatch at various points. My first 1.5 miles was 17:13. The next time I checked was at my one hour mark and I was at 4.85 miles. That was already an improvement because the other day, 4.5 miles took me just over an hour. I was not expecting much difference when I finished my run.

I set a PR!! My time for 10K was 1:16:41 That is almost 7 minutes off my previous best 10K time! What I find even more incredible about this is that I was running solo since my group normally runs at 7 pm but since I had to pick Kaitlyn up by 8:15 pm, I could not run at 7 pm. After a few laps, they joined me. Even though I was on my last lap and they were on their first, I stayed consistantly about .15 behind them. Not bad considering they were fresh and I was about to keel over