Yea! Today was a great run! I thought it was a bit greater than the results showed, but it felt great, and that’s what counts right now.
First off, the weather. As soon as I arrived in Central Park, it started to, um, pour. The beginning of my run was in rain but the rain didn’t really hold out, making a brief reappearance around mile 5 but ending soon after it restarted. Althought it was wet and cloudy, it didn’t feel too humid out; it kinda felt about right, though a little bit on the warmer side of “about right.”
My lungs felt pretty darn good. And my legs did, too. I didn’t train as much as I really wanted to this week, still trying to figure out how to balance work and running. But I did go a little longer today, running 8.15 miles (which last year I measured as 8.273 miles). I did it in just over 1 hour, which isn’t so bad and suggests to me that I have a lot of capability in my current body if I stay healthy.
I’m wondering if Garmin may have been a little off on judging my pace because I felt much faster in several places than Garmin was letting on. I saw a number of 7:45ishes when I felt was I going maybe more like 7:15s, but all in all, the added mileage didn’t diminish what is turning out to be my standard pace for now (7:26s I did today and I’m doing around 7:25s). Today’s results typically would mean to me that I’m actually a little bit faster than 7:26s in the early miles. However, for this run it’s not true because if you view the Details for this run, you’ll see that my pace actually sped up in the later miles. This was because I had some “challengers” trying to overtake me, and I fought them off for as long as I was with them!
As for pains, I’m going to call the area in the north part of the park around the ice skating rink/swimming pool “Pain Valley.” Regularly in that area I feel something here or something there, that doesn’t tend to be much of anything in the grand scheme of things. It is downward sloped in that area, which may betell why there are bodily changes yielding discomfort. Today’s sensation in Pain Valley was on the inside of my left knee, the muscley area. The sensation didn’t last longer than Pain Valley so it didn’t seem like anything. The rest of the run felt pretty strong and strengthening.
After the run, I did abs, back, arms, and legs, doing a couple more reps for abs, back, and legs than I have usually been doing.
Tomorrow I have a race! We’ll see how the extra training affects it. Extra pasta may have affected today’s strong run: I had Oglio & Aglio with Chicken from Euro Delights (a favorite meal pre-long-run) both Thursday and Friday nights, and I was thinking during the run that it was a significant factor in why I was running so strongly today. I probably could have gone two full loops around Central Park, but I thought that I best not do that just yet, that it would be smarter to hold to about 8 miles for my first long run of the year.
P.S. ArginMax and quercetin plus a Strawberry-Banana PowerGel went into my system about a half hour before my run.