Happy St. Patrick's Day!

This has never been a big holiday for me, other than the mandatory wearing of the green, and my participation in the Shamrock Run over the last few years. I am definitely not into the beer-drinking and partying aspect, and I don't love a parade. I wouldn't mind eating corned beef, cabbage, and/or Irish soda bread, but have never actually prepared them.

But I do love the color green. So there's that.

Today was a rather lucky day for me, in the running arena. Well, I felt lucky that I finally got my act together to run my scheduled 8 x 800 track workout (which had been put off from Wednesday morning to Wednesday afternoon to Thursday morning), and I actually ran my best series of 800s (really half miles) since this training season began! All but one was at or under four minutes, and all but two were at or under 8-minute pace (one of the 4:00 repeats was a little short on distance). My half mile splits and paces:

1 - 4:00 (8:00)
2 - 3:56 (7:51)
3 - 3:58 (7:56)
4 - 3:57 (7:57)
5 - 4:00 (8:15) (.49 distance, and I didn't feel that slow!)
6 - 4:00 (7:57)
7 - 4:04 (8:09)
8 - 3:55 (7:54)

I won't pretend it was easy. But it wasn't too hard; I didn't feel like my lungs were being ripped out or my legs were falling off. I found it hard to imagine running a 10K at this pace without stopping, but I've done it in the past (as well as in some 5Ks). It pretty much felt like all track work does; hard but not impossible.

I jogged a quarter mile between the intervals. After the eighth one my total distance for the track was at 5.75 miles, so I decided to make it a 10K. I jogged .2 mile then did another quarter mile fast (1:53/7:28 pace), which gave me a 10K total time of 54:01. (Which irked me, I had hoped to make it under 54 minutes!)

My warm-up was a little over 2.25 miles, and I jogged about a third of a mile to QFC when I was done, so my total morning distance was a bit over 8.75 miles.