19 miles on Saturday, probably could have gone further if I'd eaten something before my run. I ran (most of a) a marathon in the spring. Give me a cool, dry day, sufficient water and delicious orange Gatorade, and I feel like I could probably grind out a marathon now if I had to. (I'm glad I still have a month to go, though!)
One thing I can't seem to do right now is go fast, or at least what passes for fast in my world. Like I said, give me a cool, dry day and I can run a long time. But this evening was misty and warmish, and so I didn't want to be out there that long, even though as discussed endlessly here I knew I needed to get more midweek miles in.
I decided I was going to run a 5K at race pace. The problem? I haven't raced since May, when I scored a 23:55, my second-best time ever, at HACC Dash. My PR is 23:43, from December's Jingle Bell 5K. Tonight: 27:10. Ouch.
That's a lot closer to my personal worst: 29:38, where I ran a deliberately conservative race at the Orioles Advocates 5K in 2008 because I knew I was under-trained, than my PR.
Oops. That's what I get for going so long without racing and for not doing any speed training. I'm not particularly worried about it now -- the Philly and Shamrock Marathons are my running focus, but I definitely want to work on chipping away at my 5K PR and a sub-6:00 mile next year.* Still, it was 3 midweek miles that were better than no miles at all.
* It turns out that we probably won't be running Jingle Bell this year, which means I may not have another attempt at a 5K PR this year.
At least one of us ran this week. Great job!
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