A Recap of Saturdays’ Run

It was supposed to be a hot weekend so everyone was concerned about running twelve miles in sweltering weather. The fog rolling in early in the morning made for a pleasant surprise, which made for a cooler start. There were patches of fog in different parts of the twelve mile course, some areas thicker than others. As we ran along I thought the fog was getting thicker and I could barely see a few feet in front of me. It turns out it wasn’t as bad as my eyes perceived, but that my eyeglasses were misted over. I was able to see where we were going better when I took off my glasses. Since I didn’t have anything dry to wipe my eyeglasses, I kept them off for about three miles until the moisture evaporated. I had intended to run our 4:1 run/walk intervals at a slightly faster pace than last week and my pacing partner, Linda, matched me stride for stride the whole way. When I finally clicked my watch off at the end then checked our average pace per mile, I was astounded to see that it registered 9 minutes and 55 seconds per mile. That was way faster than I anticipated. No wonder we were breathing so hard. Maybe it was because we had more targets to try to catch up to this time. Every time we would see someone up front whom we thought we could catch, we went after, so we ended up passing a lot of people whom we started together with and were running non-stop. By the time we finished, the fog had burned off and the heat was back on. Two more weeks to taper for the marathon or half marathon. Time to lick our wounds and recover. Next time if I feel up to it, I’m going to write about two approaches on tapering for the race.