Long Run

This morning Tina and I did our long run of the week. We were shooting for a 10-miler. We've been doing our longer runs out at Sawyer trail just for a change of scenery, so we headed over about 8:00 this morning. Now, I know Tina has *said* she's not the competitive type, but on the way there she asks me what I set my Garmin at. Hmm, I didn't set it at anything. I thought we were just going out for a nice EASY long run. Guess not. She set her training guy for 10 miles at a 10:00/mile pace. WHAT?!?! Now who's being Jillian?!?! (Biggest Loser reference for those of you not familiar with the dreaded Jillian.)

It started out really well, because as you may or may not remember, Sawyer starts off pretty down hill. So, we were cruising right along. And there was also this woman with an annoyingly weird gait that we had to get away from. The way she ran, it sounded like she was wearing flip flops. Her feet were hitting the ground *that* hard. And I thought my foot strikes were noisy.

I've been fighting the most tenacious cold and I wasn't sure I could keep up the pace, but I just tried to stick to T's heels as we headed out towards the dreaded hill between mile 4.5 and 5. I asked her how we were doing compared to the little training man, but she wouldn't look at him. I tried to tell her that ignoring him wasn't going to make him go away. ;-) The hill tried to kill me but I made it up and we recovered a bit by jogging on the flat at the top before heading back down. Needless to say, the downhill was sooooo much better than the uphill. :-) But the trail, I think, is a bit more uphill on the way back. Sawyer is really strange. It seems like you're going downhill part of the time, but when you reverse direction it doesn't seem too uphill. Weird. Anyway, I was just watching the distance like a hawk, pleading with my body to keep going until we got back to the start. I just couldn't keep myself from obsessively watching the 1/2 mile markers on the trail on the way back. And that made the run back to the start seem extra long. We hit 10 miles and still had about a 1/4 mile to get back to the beginning but we eventually made it.

T checked the training guy.....and.......we beat him by 15 seconds. Now *that's* close! Uh huh, she's definitely competitive.

You can click on the graph for a larger view and to get a peek at the 'stats' for the run. I think those weird peaks on the speed plot are where the Garmin lost satellite signal because I'm *pretty* sure I never hit 30+ mph.