St. Patrick's Day is past

And still my Shamrock Run report remains unfinished. I actually started it on Wednesday and have written some during, er, breaks at work. But I haven't had enough time and I'm too tired at night to work on it. But I'm sure I'll finish this weekend.

Running this week has gone on as normal. On Monday, still in Portland, I did 7.25 miles recovery. I'm sure that will come up in the Shamrock Run post.

Wednesday was supposed to be speedwork--but I didn't wanna. Actually hills were on the schedule and I didn't really feel that was necessary so soon after the hills in the 15K and my spontaneous hill run last week. I decided not to substitute in some other kind of speedwork, but instead did eight miles easy. That worked.

Finally, yesterday I moved up my Friday run to Thursday and got up a little extra early to squeeze in ten miles (if I could). Eight of those miles were supposed to be marathon pace...ideally sub-nine but anything below 9:09 would do.

After a 1.5 mile warm-up (shorter than my preference), I endeavored (good word, hmmm?) to kick up my effort to race pace. Well, the effort was there but, for the first couple miles, I was a little lacking in pace. First two miles, 9:25 and 9:13.

It's possible that I would have sped up anyway, but I decided to draw on one of my strategies for boosting a lagging pace. Instead of just trying to run faster, I alternated between running quite hard and running more comfortably from block to block. That helped me hit around nine minutes for the next two miles (9:01, 9:04), on pace!

Then I really did pick up the pace and managed sub-nines the rest of the way...8.51, 8:36 for .37, 8:45, 8:55 for .63, 8:44, and a few more feet at 8:22 pace. Average for 8.05 miles, 8:59!

That left me just a block from home and I should have just stopped and got ready for work. But I really wanted to finish ten total...so I ran twice around the block (10:00 pace) to add the final half mile.

So that's it for weekday running. Sixteen miles on schedule for the weekend...I'm thinking tomorrow will be the day but we shall see.

Have a great weekend! Good luck to the L.A. Marathoners and everyone else racing this weekend!
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