Here's a quick recap of the long runs:
1. Feb 16th - 19.3 miles @ 7:55 pace.
The first run in north county from moonlight beach south, then north to end of Leucadia and then back. the splits are below. I felt mostly good the entire time with no pain and not that much fatigue. The group was new to me (and i to them) and very focused on the run, which was not all that much of a struggle, but simply faster than I'd been doing my long runs. We did have a fast finish down Neptune drive and up the lovely hill to the Moonlight Beach parking lot.
2. Feb 23rd - 17.7 miles @ 7:45 pace
This was surprisingly hard for me. I was predicting that I would be easier and faster as I you cannot get flatter than our route down the rather boring Silver Strand. However, that was the 10th day of working out on the new Dave "Hutch" Hutchison schedule and it taught me that I'd been taking it a bit too easy. Nature called at mile 2.5 and I had to really struggle to catch the group who had stopped at the first water station. We turned around at 9 miles and I decided to just pick it up a bit to a 7:15 pace for a mile or so, but then I had more stomach issues, and general fatigue, and fell back. The last few miles really felt like I was struggling to finish around a 8 min pace. This brought (the following day) the return of the sore left tendon...more on that later...
3. March 2nd - 19.6 miles @ 7:48 pace
This was the first run the incorporated mixing in some MP training. I felt really good during this run and kept getting lost whenever I was running in the front. We ran part of the SD Half Marathon course to get ready for next weekend which is downtown. For some reason the instantaneous splits on my watch were faster than I was actually going as I learned when the system did it's correction.
both route and pace are below:
