Joy of a long, hard tempo run

I am having a good week. Have run six days straight, total of 41 miles. Plus I swam Masters Tuesday (and will tomorrow) and rode spin twice (with Tuesday's class with semi-psycho Julie one of toughest interval rides I have ever done in 56 minutes!). Still need to add that third spin class or a trainer ride or two, but the build is definitely on.

Tonight's run was terrific. As so often seems the case I am best matched with strong female runners 10-15 years younger. (Well, someone has to run with them! ;-) Lynn and all but one of the guys wanted to do Jim's track workout as an interval workout on the roads (track was icy), but I decided I would rather run a tough 8 mile tempo run with Ellen and Margaret, training for their first Boston, as well as fast guy Rudi who did not want to run a track workout. Here's the data from my monitor (finally have bothered to add the footpod so I get mileage data, too - mileage was right on - I mapped the road course on the USATF website before we ran it):

Lap Time Lap Time HR Max Avg Min Dist min/mile

1. 0:09:17.5 0:09:17.5 150 152 137 101 0.972

9:33

2. 0:25:12.2 0:15:54.7 158 158 148 139 1.954

8:08

3. 0:39:23.4 0:14:11.2 164 170 163 155 1.901

7:27

4. 0:57:28.0 0:18:04.6 147 166 156 147 2.262

7:59

5. 1:05:08.9 0:07:40.9 156 156 147 138 0.945

8:07

We were trying to be well behaved so held back on the warmup and then heated it up. The course was hilly (for our part of the world) - the 7:27 2-mile segment was especially tough because a good chunk of it was somewhat uphill.

I think this workout says great things about my recovery from my achilles injury and my overall progress since my crash 1.5 years ago.

One of my Spivey running buddies is Jeff Couch - his brother is the guy who calculated the new USAT rankings and Jeff gave me a clue ahead of time that I was 203 of 902 in my triathlon age group last year. Now the rankings are up and there it is! I am not feeling too bad about that position given that last year was sub-par for me coming back from the crash and that I was at the wrong end of the age group.

I will be in Florida with Sherry at my aunt's 95 birthday party on the 18th, so no Cary March Madness Half Marathon. Instead, when I am on the east coast on business the end of next week I am now planing to run the B&A Trail Half Marathon near Annapolis, MD, on 3/4.