Friday:
After completing last night’s track workout with a 106° heat index, I ended up felling pretty tired throughout the run this morning. Nathan, Josh, and I met at Bellevue Church of Christ for a 45-minute recovery run through the streets of Bellevue, and as usual for Friday I did this run in my Saucony Hattoris.
I trudged through the first 30-minutes with Josh and Nathan, but decided to fall back for the final 15 as they picked up the pace a bit. Once I caught up to them at the end we did 6 x 100m stride outs in the church parking lot. As has been the case lately, Nathan and Josh blew past me like I was sitting still. Even though I was tired today, I was pleased that my legs didn’t have much residual soreness from the track workout last night.
In total I completed just under 5.25-miles with the strides, at an average pace of 9:09 per mile.
Saturday:
This morning our group joined the Nashville Striders for their “Bongo to Bongo” training run. This is a 14-mile route that starts at Bongo Java in East Nashville, heads toward Bongo Java near Belmont University, and completes a loop in the Belmont area (that was previously part of the Country Music Marathon course) before heading back.
The run was scheduled to start at 6:30am, but since most of this route is exposed with no shade, Dan suggested that we start earlier at 6:00am. There were several from our group that got there early, and I ended up running most of the route with Dan and Mary. My schedule called for 16-miles easy today, so I just planned on running a couple extra at the end.
Fortunately we ended up with a good amount of cloud cover, so the sun was never an issue. However the humidity was over 90% throughout the run, which made things tough. For the first four miles of the run I just flat-out felt tired like I did on Friday. It seemed like Dan and Mary were dragging me along. We started off fairly conservative with a first mile of 9:35, but the pace quickly dropped down into the mid-to-low 8:00s through the next three miles.
As we were running uphill through Music Row during mile five I started thinking about just dropping back and letting them go on ahead. At the same time I remembered something that Saucony posted on their Facebook page this week. It said “Never make a decision on an uphill.”
With that in mind, I decided to wait on making the decision to drop back until we crested the hill. When we got to the top I started feeling a lot better, and then I kept feeling better throughout mile six, and fell into a great rhythm. Just before we reached the normal turnaround for the route, Dan asked if we minded doing an extra loop to add a little distance. Since I needed two additional miles anyway, this sounded a lot better than doing them at the end.
The loop he took us on was completely new to me, but I really enjoyed it. When we got back to Belmont Boulevard we ran into some other members of our group who had started later along with the rest of the runners from the Nashville Striders. For miles two through 13 our splits all fell within a range of 8:38 to 7:59 per mile, with the majority being in the mid to lower part of the range.
For miles 14 and 15, we intentionally slowed the pace a bit and ran back toward Bongo East with Amaya from our group. During mile 16 up Woodland Street I picked the pace back up a bit to see how things would feel on tired legs. Overall I still felt great, and I only needed about 1/2-mile to complete my scheduled 16 when I got back to Bongo East. In total I finished just over 16-miles with an average pace of 8:24 per mile.
For the week I completed 54 total miles, which is the third time out of the past six weeks that I’ve crossed the 50-mile mark. Also this week I passed 1,300 total miles for the year, which is 493-miles ahead of where I was at the same point last year.
Beast Mode….ON!