Grease Lightning

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Whoooooooo Hooooooo!!!!!!

Wow is all that I can say!  I was really not feeling it this morning, and had no motivation to run going to bed last night or getting up this morning.  My girls needed to be at the school for XC practice at 5:40 this morning and I needed to do a workout.

The problem was that I wasn't going to be able to get my 6x800's in early enough to get back home to get them to school by 5:40 considering the drive to the track, the warm up, the 800's and then the drive home just to turn around again and drive them back to the school by 5:40.  If I was going to pull this off I was going to have to get up by 4:00 am which I was not willing to do today.

I compromised and decided I would run a tempo run at home instead cutting out the need to drive to and from the school so many times.  That fell apart somewhat as well when I stayed in bed at 4:30 when my alarm went off.  I changed the plans once again and decided to take them to school first and then come home and run my tempo run before heading off to work by 7:00.

Here is where the wow comes in.

I was still having issues getting out the door, even though I was dressed out in my speedy Saucony gear and Saucony Kinvara shoes.  I finally made it out the door at 6:00 and figured at the top end I would need about 40 minutes to get the 4 miles done.... still not feeling the motivation, so I really didn't know how much of a "tempo" run this would be.  That of course coupled with just coming off of 34 miles in the past 4 days.

I hit the road and started my easy warm up mile.  Once I hit the mile marker I kicked it up a notch to my tempo pace.  I still don't have my MyTach GPS watch so I didn't know what pace I was running other then by feel.  It felt hard, but I was not pushing myself to full exhaustion.  I passed the two mile marker and just kept going at the same pace trying to hold on.  I was breathing hard, but wasn't as out of breath as I am during a 5k race so I knew I was holding it where I should.  The three mile marker came and I started to taper back to start cooling off in the last mile.  I finished off at the 4 mile mark and walked the .2 back to the house feeling really good about the run.

As I walked into the house I assumed I had run around 35 minutes and was very happy with that.  I, for the first time, checked my watch and it said 31:12........ I had to look again...... yup, 31:12!  I don't know that I have ever run 4 miles in that time, in fact I am absolutely positive I have not.  I couldn't look at the splits fast enough.

Mile 1 - 9:08

Mile 2 - 7:15

Mile 3 - 7:09

Mile 4 - 7:40

I was in absolute disbelief.  With all the distance running lately and speed work limited to one day a week I didn't realize I was actually building that kind of a short distance time..... but I am very happy :)

Have you ever gone a while without really paying attention to how fast you were running the shorter distances only to find out that you too had a WOW moment?  Tell us about it.



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