Little By Little

Saturday's group run brought us out to scenic Wayland and the Longfellow Club. The location was perfect due to the fact that the club was a 10 minute ride from my house, which allowed me to leave the house a little later than usual.

As I signed in, I took the leap to write down a "16" next to the anticipated mileage. Having never run further than 13 miles up to this point, I was a little nervous bumping that up by 3 miles in one shot. After stretching, saying our hellos to our fellow runners, receiving a few team updates from Jan and route instructions from Jack, we were on our way.

It was a fairly cold morning, with a start time temperature of about 15, but there was no wind and the sun was out so it felt warmer than that. I started out with Mike and Aimee, both of whom have experience running Boston, as well as the route we were running on this day. I was a little nervous running with them due to the fact that that their normal pace is quite a bit faster than my 8:30/9:00 per mile, but they assured me that they weren't going to push it on a long training run and that negative splits were on the docket for today. That was music to my ears. As we started out down Route 20 and took a hard right around Sky Restaurant, the pace was easy and everyone in the group was able to have a casual conversation.

As we made it out to the first water stop, I felt great. Our splits were a little on the fast side, but within reason. We continued on past Lincoln-Sudbury High School and made our way down Lincoln Rd. to Concord Rd. After not having my bearings for the first quarter of the run, I suddenly realized where I was, as Katie takes the same back roads to work on occasion. As we made it to the second water stop, I still felt great. The last couple of miles had us running at sub 8:30 splits, which may have not been too fast for Mike and Aimee, but was approaching the orange zone for me for a long run. We started to slow things down as we left the stop and headed towards Rt. 117. We made it up to the final water stop and the halfway point in 1:11:46, which had us at an 8:45 avg pace to that point. I kept my Garming going at the water stops so it was probably showing a slower pace than what was really the case.

This is where things started to hit a bit of a bump for me. As I went past Verrill Farm, my stomach started to feel lousy and I had to slow down a bit. It subsided somewhat as I kept going, but it ended up being something that I needed to manage myself through for the entire second half of the run by walking a few times here and there. This was the second run in a row for me where this happened with no history of this in the past, so I may need to get in front of this moving forward. I tried to hang with Mike and Aimee as we kept going, but I told them to take off once we hit the final water stop with about 3.2 miles left. I was able to keep them within sight for most of the way back to club, which was a moral victory for me. I also screwed myself up ealrier thinking that I could see Rt. 20 in the distance, when it was really Rt. 27, which meant I had more than the mile left that I initially thought. Shoot.....!

When it was all said and done, I had a really good run. The total distance ended up at 16.35 and I even finished with a sub 9:00/mile pace which I was really happy about.

http://connect.garmin.com/activity/23015584

Lessons learned from this run include:

1. I need to work on my negative splits. Jack made a point about this during the run prep, but did I listen......???

2. I need to eat a little lighter before my runs.

3. I can push myself a little more than I thought on the long runs, as long as I'm smart about it and listen to myself when I start to hit the wall.

The run ended just in time for me to meet my gang in the lobby of the club for John's weekly swim lesson. Mike was able to hang around for a while (which John was really excited about) and see his little cousin make his way up and down the pool with his 3 other little friends for the 1/2 hour lesson. John and Audrey were also the lucky recipients of cookies on the way out once the lesson was done, courtesy of Jan who was still there in the lobby closing up shop after the run (thanks, Jan.)

I took Sunday off completely and I'm planning to just do some more stretching today. I'll move this week's runs back a day each leading up to Saturday's long run. Have a good week.