Saturday, July 07, 2007

I can't seem to put a title on this post. Rude!

I did my first second time FIRST long run this morning (confusing enough?). I had 13 miles on tap, so ran the course of a half-M I've done 3 times before. I decided to just run with my gut, and not to notice pace, figuring that would give me the most accurate picture of where I am now.

It was very very COLD. For Wellington. Toasty warm by most N. American standards. Sometimes the sun came out and it was lovely, but at random intervals the sky clouded over and I was pelted with ice cold rain. How delightful! The run went well. I was dehydrated, and was very glad I'd brought sports beans with me, as I was definitely fading a little bit by half way. My pace felt reasonably steady and I finished in 1:55, for a little over 13.1 miles at around 8:47 pace. SWEET. I'm pretty happy with that, as it's under my PMP. I will be good and do my future long runs more slowly, but I didn't really feel like this was *too* fast, and I did want to know what running naturally would lead to.

All in all a lovely run. At least until P got stuck in our street, which is very narrow, because a big truck could not turn round. I didn't have my phone, and although he wasn't that late (less than 15 mins), I didn't know whether to head towards home, and it just happened to be during one of the icy cold rain intervals, not the glistening rainbow and pale sun intervals. Had to RUSH to the pool to meet my sisters. Forgot my hoodie and my towel. Fortunately super J shared. Ahsome.

In fact, so far this weekend's been great. Last night I hung at work drinks for awhile, before unpexpectedly deciding to meet P and a mutual friends to see Blades of Glory. I barely stopped laughing. My sisters and I had a nice big lunch after swimming, then wandered round the shops where I bought some ingredients for a super cute new outfit. Unfortunately, silly P went out riding and wants to be a homebody tonight, so I can't get prettied up!

Retraction/update: P had just got back from a very impressive cold and hilly 100k ride, and wasn't sure he was up to Indian food. After a shower, he decided he was ok for a quiet night out, and we had a delicious and romantic evening at a Greek cafe we hadn't tried before. And I got to wear the new threads

7 comments:

Mike said...

Sounds like you had a good run ... apart from the freezing rain that is. I checked out the FIRST training thingy plans and they look good. I'm going to use one for my training for next year's Rotorua Marathon and try to go sub 4 ... just got a small matter of settling the score with the ironman gods in January - they somehow caused me (it wasn't my lack of fitness!) to go over 7hrs (by 24seconds) ... Sub 6 for sure this time around.

Keep up the blog ... I've learnt how to use RSS feeds now and so I get instant updates of your blog ... so much easier to stalk people these days :)

Good luck with the rest of your Marathon training.

Are you doing the 'Phedipidations World Wide Half Marathon' ( http://www.worldwidehalf.com/cgi-bin/wwhalf/home )in October???

Bruce said...

NIce run, thats a pretty good pace , keep up the good work, plenty more long runs ahead before Auckland i bet.

Wes said...

I luv that your training run is faster than my race pace. You ROCK :-)

Michele said...

great job on the long run.

Unknown said...

Ooh, you're so fast. I'm so jealous! :)

JenC said...

I can't post a title either. And for once I actually came up with a good one. Oh well!

Well, you are definitely a speedy one. Your training pace is faster than my PR!

Love2Run said...

I got it 'FIRST long run'. Way to go, running easy/hard and under MP too. I was just thinking that this plan might work really well for you because you already like to cross train. I tried this plan but only lasted for a few weeks; couldn't stand not being able to run every day. Good luck with it (it's not easy).