yesterday and today

Yesterday Tim and I met at 2pm for a ten mile loop around the lake. We always meet at Barton Springs, so we end up a mile over what we plan just because of the out and back from the springs to the trail. My legs felt a little heavy to start, and I'm sure that's just leftover from Bandera. We were settled in at a good pace pretty quickly, but ended up picking it up a bit on the back side of the lake. Tim doesn't like getting passed on the lake, so anytime we hear someone coming we inevitably pick it up. Sometimes it doesn't really bother me, but on days where my legs are dead it's not quite as much fun. We ended the run at 7:30 pace. Not exactly "recovery" but my legs felt better afterwards. The weather was awesome and we saw three to four people smoking pot on the trial..ha ha.

After talking with Steve last night I decided to back off my mileage today and do a long run on Thursday. I was basically just going to frontload this week since I'll be gone over the weekend. I'm still doing the same thing, just distributing the miles differently. I ran with Steve this morning for the 14 mile loop. We were chasing Kevin and Andrew at the beginning of the run but then settled in to a slower (but still fast) pace behind them. I knew I'd pay if I tried to run with Kevin today. We ran the last few miles we Kamran and he added a nice positive attitude to the run. I think Steve may have woke up on the wrong side of the bed. Andrew said his garmin had our mileage at 13.4 so we were a bit short, but our overall pace was 6:58. I feel really positive about this. I'm already comfortably running at or below my last marathon goal pace which was a 7:18 for a 3 hour and 10 minute marathon. I think that runner faster in the build phase will pay it's dividends come race day. I just need to make sure I do take some recovery so I don't run too much, too fast, too soon.

pluses: feeling positive about long term goals

minuses: handling volunteers (not you C Hall)