Liftoff

AM: 10 easy miles on the beach. Good since I was feeling yesterday's run.

One of the maddening frustrations of running, or engaging challenges, depending on your mood, is marshalling all the aspects of running leading into a goal race.

Slowing, patiently building a strength foundation, and getting right with your speed and race pace are hard by themselves. Merging those threads together so they support and complement each other only happens for me once or twice a  year if I'm lucky, and the window does not stay open long.

I'm grateful I still have a couple months of training, even if the road does look long, hot and dusty from here. Quite a bit has gone right, and some hasn't, but I'm still a ways from where I need to be.

AM: 10 miles. A beautiful morning outside, Elise rode with me for the last 4.

PM: 6 miles.

We had an epic drive back from Jacksonville to St. Petersburg yesterday afternoon. It's about a 4 hour drive. Half an hour in, the AC stopped working and the engine temperature quickly pegged out. The coolant tank was emtpy - maybe a leak - but really we had no choice but to get home and deal with it from there.

To keep the engine from exploding, we had to drive the remaining 3.5 hours with the heat all the way up. As you might imagine, driving across Florida in July with the heat blasting is not a good time. Windows rolled down to avoid suffocating, then we drove through a lighting storm and pouring rain.

Today we found out there is a crack in the engine block. On the positive side, this apparently afflicts Civics bought around 2006 and the engine will be replaced for free.

AM: 5 miles. Although I wasn't happy with how I ran my last 5k, in retrospect I realized it was  a good thing to put some fast, shorter races into the middle of my marathon training. Along those lines, I decided to jump into a local track series. I missed the 1600, but they're hosting a 3200 this Saturday evening, and a 5000 in August.

PM: 12 miles at track. I did my own thing tonight, one of my core marathon workouts.

6x1 mile with 400 jog recovery, target was 5:16s. Splits:

1. 5:15.2
2. 5:15.3
3. 5:15:5
4. 5:16.7
5. 5:16.1
6. 5:16.4

We had a nice cloud cover which really helped. The funny thing about this workout is the first repeat feels totally manageable, and by #6 you feel like you are sprinting in molasses.

AM: 6 slow, sore miles.

PM: 8 miles with Quint, off the beaten path. Took the Pinellas Trail past Tropicana Field into South St. Pete, industrial decay.

AM: 8 miles.

PM: 8 miles at lunch with Quint.

AM: 8 miles.

PM: 9 miles with Quint and Mike.

AM: 5 with strides, track race tonight.

PM: 5 miles, including a 3200 at the University of Tampa.

This was a lowkey event, run in a single heat. The closest I've run to this distance was the 2 mile in high school, and my intention was just to lock in with fast runners and knock out two miles (well, 3200) as quickly as possible.

My training partner Lee gave me another talking to on Tuesday about not racing against the clock, sticking with the competition, etc. I promised him this was a good race to implement that approach, and I did my best to stick to it.

I expected the race to go out fast, but after 200 meters the pace felt fairly conservative. So on the backstrech I took the lead and led the group for the next 300 meters or so. The first lap passed in 1:11-1:12, and shortly after that the reality settled on me that I couldn't hang with that and expect to finish in one piece. The train passed me by over the next 400, and I slowed a second or so per mile.

Normally I'm pretty good about maintaining my pace, but in the humidity it's very hard to run an aggressive pace and stick with it. I don't think starting hard had any seriously negative impact, but I don't think it helped massively either. I felt a tangible wall, right around 5:00 pace. I ran mostly 75 second 400s, and felt OK, but my training right now is not optimized for sustaining paces much faster than that.

All in all though, this was a positive race. I ran a full week of mileage and hung around better than I did in my last 5k. I came through 1600 in 4:56, and at that point I focused on keeping my time under 10 minutes. I hit the 7th lap in 8:46, and was able to close in 71-72.

The most important thing for tonight was to adjust myself to running much faster than 5:55 pace. My family came out to cheer, and my older daughter ran 800 meters of the cooldown with me. My friends made a big deal of that, and that was something I could really be proud of.