You must do the things you think you cannot do.
~
Eleanor Roosevelt

Saturday, April 14, 2012

Half Marathon 15 min PR

Flat, long run by tracyrunning at Garmin Connect - Details

It wasn't a race, but 13.1 is still 13.1 so I'll take it.  I've been alternating the elevation for my long runs each week. This week was [mostly] flat and next week will be hilly.

Because of our crazy weekend schedule, I could run before Ella's Girl Scouts field trip at 9am this morning - or - not at all.

So I did what any reasonable person would do...I reached out to my running club and asked if anyone wanted to join me for a 5am start to run 12-14 miles. You know, I only got one response. [insert sarcarstic, surprised look]

Ok, maybe it is a little crazy to get up before 4am, drive 20 minutes into town and run - in the dark - a route I'm only vaguely familiar with, but it was also a lot of fun.

There was one interesting thing, in a weird way, that we encountered - A woman driving down one of the main streets stopped and asked us if were moms. Um, yes, and ?

She had a heavy accent so she was hard to understand, but she also sounded like she had been drinking - this was around 5:45am so I hope that wasn't the case. She asked us if her 17 year old son is arrested for drinking at a friend's house, will he also get a DUI and keeps going on about being a mom, etc until she drove off. Very strange.

After that little bit of excitement we thought it would be fun to miss some turns and started joking that we may end up running farther than 14 miles and still be miles from our cars.

One missed turn just took us down a cul-de-sac so it was no biggie. Another - otoh - was because a tree filled with cherry blossoms was covering the street sign so we completely missed it. And ran, and ran, and ran looking for our turn.

It was a country road with no houses so we had no way of knowing exactly where we were. We finally came to a farm with an address sign at its entrance...we were on our way to a neighboring town. Whoopsie!

Got turned around, searched even harder for the turn, found it and off we go. That little whoops added about a mile to the directions we were following which turned out pretty cool. We aimed for 12-14 and split the difference with 13.1 and finished in 2:12 without really trying - we stopped at several intersections to read (and re-read) our directions and just chatted almost the whole way.

That time is no biggie for my friend who is super speedy and often places in her age group. But for me, it is a very big deal because that's a 15 minute PR. Fist bump!

This run was an excellent confidence booster as I enter the last 4 weeks of training.

4 comments:

misszippy said...

Nice Tracy! Perfect timing to build that race confidence. Are you running Harper's Ferry 1/2?

Funny about the woman you encountered!

*~*~* Tracy said...

Thanks Amanda!
And yes, the Harpers Ferry Half is on my schedule. gulp! What's 1,000 ft of elevation gain among friends??

The Green Girl said...

Wow, that is a serious PR - you go, girl!

And 1,000 elevation gain? Nice!

*~*~* Tracy said...

Thanks Green Girl!

I want to clarify though...my crazy hilly half is May 12th. My 15 min PR was on a training run and flat as a pancake! :D

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