Long Run Sunday

My finish time is murky. I know there was time between when the gun went off and when I crossed the start line, but I'm not positive where the start line was. I thought it was at the end of the block, but I don't know. I saw one time on the clock when I crossed what I thought was the finish line, but then I got held up at the end because some elderly volunteers were having terrible trouble getting people's bib tags on the stick. (You tear off a tag on your bib and hand it over at the finish. They keep them in order.) On account of that confusion, I forgot to stop my watch. So I tried to guesstimate. My official finish time is 45:50. I saw 45:38 at the finish line. So I'm just gonna call it 45:10, which was my predicted time based on my best 10k finish. It's only a second or two difference in pace.

I was so sure it was gonna take me longer to do this 5 miles (8k) than it took me to do the 10k, but I was right on pace. I'm sure a ton of it has to do with the weather. It's so much cooler in the a.m. than in the afternoon when I usually run. Plus it was just that much cooler last weekend (60s). And then there's the whole race adrenaline thing. I had some folks right on my tail for the last 1.5 miles, and I was not about to let them pass me, either.

The race setup was pretty good. The course was nice enough. Half of it was through a residential neighborhood and the other half was along a lakeshore. The water stop was right at a turnaround, so you could grab water on either side. They had time callers at each of the first three mile marks.

It was sponsored by the treatment center* that Fly Girl works at, so she came along and cheered me on (and carried my stuff). I was expecting to be a lot slower, so she almost missed me at the finish line, as she thought she had a little more time to meander. I totally didn't see her, though. I was concentrating on the clock and then on the clusterfuck at the end of the chute.

*Get it? Treatment center? Easy Does It? Heh.

My long runs are getting into the 6 and 7 mile range now. This is where it starts to get difficult, and I'm totally looking forward to it. The thing is, anything shorter than this and I feel horrible guilt stopping at all. But I know in any race that's 5 miles or longer there's gonna be at least one water stop, and I always walk through the water stops in a race. So for a long run that long, I should have no qualms about taking a breather along the way. Plus I'm supposed to be going nice and slow, so it's not so effortful and is actually quite enjoyable, as long as it's not too hot. I need to be dragging my ass out of bed in the mornings.

I'm a little disappointed that I'm not going farther already, actually. I might bump things up a little, though. The schedule I'm on has my longest long run at 10 miles. But there's two race weekends/stepback weeks in there, too. I don't think I'll do any more races before the half marathon, so I might move things up a week and get one more longer run in.