I don't know where this freakishly warm weather has come from the past few weeks, but I'll take it. Honestly, today felt a tad cold, though my widget says it was 57º, but that gives you an idea of how much sun and 60º weather we've had lately. I'm loving it.
Saturday was supposed to be our long run day, but a mile in, Helen's ankle was really hurting, so we ended up walking back and detouring through town instead. It was still bothering her on Sunday, so she insisted that I go ahead and do the run myself. This gave me the golden opportunity to finally listen to the new Girl Talk album I'd downloaded. I first heard about it from Bitch Cakes and went ahead and downloaded it, but it wasn't until my friend Dennis mentioned it recently that I finally started listening. Like Sheryl said on her blog, it's PERFECT for running. If you listen to music when you run, download it for free here.
I'm not sure if it was the weather or the music, but yesterday's run was great. I've just recently started playing with Mr. Garmin's pace partner feature, so I went ahead and picked an easy 12:15/mi pace for my long run and off I went. I quickly saw that the 12:15 was going to be too slow, so I just switched to a different view that didn't tell me how far ahead I was and kept on going. Somehow, mile 1 happened in 11:04 and felt really good so I just kept at it... I know that long runs are supposed to be slow, but 4 miles isn't particularly long, so I decided to just go with the good feeling and ended up with an average 11:21/mi pace! I haven't done that since October! I'll admit that Mile 4 was difficult and that I did stop for about 5 seconds a few times, but I can already tell a huge different in my heart rate in comparison with last week!
The best part of this run? If I keep up like this, I'll definitely be able to finish the half in under 2:45:00! I need to go in and tweak the training plan a bit after talking to Christina, but I'm feeling really good overall. Now if only I could motivate myself to do some strength workouts at my apartment! I bought those bands and haven't used them at all! Tsk tsk, Nicky!
Anyway, I'll upload the stats from the run when Garmin Connect is loading properly. :)
