Long on Lester, Achieving Eightness, and Other Stories

After Saturday's 14 on the towpath I hit the trail again on Sunday. This time it was the Lester Rail Trail for my usual four loops of six miles. I say usual because that's usually what I do run there. It has, however, been a while since I've run there. It's much simpler to just run from home, but I like the softer surface of the trail as well as the lack of traffic. The goal was, as usual, to run each loop a little faster, and this time I succeeded: the approximate times were something on the order of: 54.5, 51.5, 50, 47.5 minutes. Good trend. I'm reasonably happy with it.

It took a lot, however, to get down to eight minute pace for that last lap. This has been the case quite a bit lately: it's just tough to run the kind of speeds that used to be routine a couple years ago. In fact, it wasn't so far back in the past when I would average eight minute pace for the entire year! This year my average pace per mile has been hovering around 8 and a half. Is it any wonder that my race times are also slower?

How was the rest of the week, you ask. It's been going ok, and I'm reasonably happy with it. Slow going Monday morning and then evening with the MCRR gang prior to the meeting (and it was a good meeting, with Mark Croghan as the speaker). A little better for Tuesday's twelve, and then better still today (Wednesday): I just barely managed a tempo run as part of the 11-mile course, which I completed, along with an additional three, at exactly eight-minute pace.

I signed up for the Fall Classic Half this Sunday, and then just yesterday learned that there's a little 5k in Brunswick on Saturday. Now running the 5k would probably slow me down to some extent for the half. But I'd like to do the 5k, and I really don't know how much slowing would occur. Decision time.