- I did a Half-Marathon practice race this past Saturday night. It was basically and out and back on the Springwater trail, heading East first then into the Sunset back towards the river after the turn around. It was nice and unique to run a race Saturday evening instead of the usual early Sunday morning race slot.
- My goal was to keep on my marathon pace as much as possible. It's hard to fight that urge at the start of the race and take off like when you're a kid at school racing your friends. The race actually had 'pacers' for mile times that had signs and would be running the race too. I positioned my self between the 8:00 and 9:00 min per mile pacers. I quickly caught up to the 8:00 pacers and realized I was going to fast and outside of my goal. So i forced my self to slow down and I wouldn't let myself pass the 8;00 pacers. I actually drifted back a bit after a few miles. Then a bit after mile 4, I got caught at a stop light and had to wait for the cross walk signal.
- Everything went pretty good, the race started to thin out after the the turn around point. I got past by with about 2 miles to go. So I decided to follow him in and pick up my pace a little. Then when I were about 1/2 mile out the old feeling of being in a race kicked in, so I kicked it in and sprinted to the finish.
- I managed to place 7th for my division and 3rd for my age group. That was a great confidence boost for my training. Considering I treated most of this race as a tempo run and probably could have gone faster if this was my goal of a half-marathon. But as I know I have to run twice this in 7 weeks.
- This is the most total miles I've ran in one week so far. 24 miles for the week. It was actually a pretty tough week running. Because of my long run last Sunday and my travel schedule I ended up running 4 out of 5 days and then took Friday and Saturday off. My 'rest day' ended up being 18 holes of golf that I walked and Saturday hiking up dunes and chasing my kids around the beach at Pacific City.
- I had a 12 mile run planned this morning where I would just add run one more bridge further, this case the Morrison, to my run from last week. So apparently the bridge pedal was this morning so I had to compete with the above picture on my run this week. Actually it wasn't that bad. The only couple of times it got inconvenient. Crossing the Sellwood bridge a lot of the bikers stopped to take pictures, so they stopped up on the sidewalk. I had to jump down off the sidewalk and run on the bridge with the bikers. I got a surprise look from the guy I was running next to on his bike. Then the other time was trying to get on the Morrison bridge, Natio was packed with every biker in Portland for 5 blocks. I ended up just cutting through the crowd of bikes.
- In the end the run was tough and a bit slower than my 11 miles last week. I'm thinking about doing the Sunset Half next Saturday as a training run and 'race' practice for the marathon.
- I had a nice long 11 mile run this week over a new course. I left my house in SE over the Sellwood bridge, ran along the west side of the river, crossed the Hawthorne, and back towards my house via Springwater trail.
- This definitely broke up the loop I had been doing for the past 2 months on long runs. I was thinking that Sunday morning I would be one of the few people doing this run. Apparently it's one of the most popular runs in some form or another to run across the bridges in a loop. I past several of the same people going the opposite way as me. I came across one guy running across the Sellwood and then again on the Hawthorne.
- I was pretty sore from the run the rest of the day and Monday. I did a cross training day Monday. Then I did 5 miles on the treadmill Tuesday. The hardest part was mentally doing 5 miles on the treadmill.
- I'm going to try this weekend to run close to 12-13.1 miles and do the same bridge loop but by going one more bridge to the Morrison it will add a mile.
