Getting Out The Long Sleeves

The overnight lows last night were supposed to be in the mid to upper 40s, so I laid out a long-sleeved running shirt for this morning's run. It definitely wasn't as cold as last Thursday morning (42 degrees in short sleeves...), but I did not regret wearing long sleeves today.

On a whim, I decided to run my 5.5 mile loop in the opposite direction this morning. I've been running this loop a lot lately - there are a lot of 5 mile runs on my training plan - so running it in the opposite direction was just what I needed. With the elevation changes occurring at different mile markers, it seemed like a totally different route!

I logged another sub-10:00/mile pace, this time with my average HR at 150. The pace would have been around 10:00 and my average HR would have been lower if I didn't attack the long hill during mile 5 (normally my long downhill recovery during mile 2). It ends up that mile 5 was my fastest split at 9:33.

I'm hoping that having my fastest splits during the more difficult parts of my training runs will help me on my mental/emotional part of the marathon training.

I think I'll find out a little bit more on Friday morning when I do my 22 mile - and final really long - training run. I haven't definitely picked out a route yet, however, I'm thinking of parking at the Rockville or Shady Grove Metro stations, taking the Metro downtown and then running from there back out to the 'burbs. I can run a bit in the city, over to the CCT trail, up into Bethesda and over to the Rock Creek Trail, up to Viers Mill Road and then over to Rockville Pike where I'll either take the Metro a few stops back to my car or run to my car (I'll see how many miles I would have run already and how tired I am...). I know that the CCT trail is about 8 miles from downtown to Bethesda, and that from that point to the Rockville Metro via the Rock Creek Trail and Viers Mill Road is 13 miles (this is pretty much the Parks Half Marathon course run in the opposite direction). Sounds pretty good, right??