I loved spending time there in college and miss it now, so I decided to execute my 15-miler along the Charles River. I parked my car on Mass Ave just before the bridge. Since the meter had a 2 hour limit and my run took about 2.5, including stretching, I got my first parking ticket in a long time. Compared to the toll my body paid, the $25 was in the noise.
Well I was particularly nervous about this run. I guess that's because I've had some rough runs lately. And 15 miles is nothing for me to shrug at. I've attached a little clip I took before I left the condo. And here's a pic I took of all my gear strewn out on the bed before I packed up and left.
So how'd the run go you ask? I'd say pretty well. Aside from some mild-to-severe blisters on my right foot (its always the right because its smaller) and some mild-to-severe chafing (I should've put body glide on my legs even though I had spandex on) the run went extremely well. As a matter of fact, I shaved about 10 seconds off my pace as compared to my 14-miler 2 weeks ago. So that's an average of an 8:20 mile! That puts me 11 miles away from the marathon but 10 seconds UNDER my goal pace. So I'm feeling pretty darn happy about it with almost 3 months of training still ahead.
My legs started getting very heavy around mile 11. But thanks to my miserable 12-miler last weekend, I was used to heavy legs and was able to shake it off. I expected a sense of nostalgia running along the Charles since I really haven't done so since college. But it felt somewhat foreign. I think the reason here is that I never spent much time there in the dead of winter. There's a bit of snow still in Boston and parts of the river were even frozen over.
Please checkout the run data, I worked hard for it:
Splits
Graph
Was that a 7:59 mile I saw at mile 14 on your stats page??? If so, that's pretty crazy, Jas. If you can bust out that pace, at the end of a long run, with heavy legs, with a couple months of training still left before the actual marathon, I'd say your marathon goal pace is VERY within reach, to say the least.
ReplyDeleteYour splits seemed to vary a bit from mile to mile, but for the most part they were all within 20 seconds or so of each other, which is totally solid. And your pace as a whole was AWESOME. :)
What kind of speed and and strength work does your training plan have you doing?
Anyway, awesome work with that long run. I have never, in my life, run 15 miles...
Jenn