good long run...

Wow, what a great long run I had today. It was finally not -1000000 degrees, and the sidewalks were clear in most places, so I ran at a decent pace for the first 8miles (just under 8min miles) then picked up the last 10.1 to 6:40/mile. It was exactly what I was trying to do. The feeling at the end of the run was just right, too: my legs were just emptied out at about 1mile to go, so I had to run a bit on fumes, but keep the pace, which is the purpose of this kind of long run.

Even better was that this came off the heels of a track workout yesterday. Usually I'll put a day or two of just miles before the long run, but with Ryan coming up this weekend, and Amélie's race tomorrow, I wasn't going to have time on Saturday, so I went for it. Pleasantly surprised. The track workout was good, too: 6x1k in 3:08 with 200m rec. Faster than my 5k pace at Hanover, with not too much recovery (about 75-90secs), so I'm sure I'm not in 16:15 shape anymore! We'll see what happens next weekend. I'd like to go to Vancouver to try a half, but whatever, patience. The time will come.

If the weather is bad next Sunday, I'll do 5k and 10k at Ile Bizzard and try to run both at a decent pace, but not full out. If the weather conditions are good, I'll just do the 10k and see what I've got. It's not the best course, but I have run it enough to be able to read my result.

Big workouts for the kids this week, well Wednesday anyway. Monday was a bit of a recovery day for them, and they managed 5x1k at 5k pace with 200rec pretty well. Wednesday was 1200-800-400-400-800-1200, at 3k-2k-1k pace. Pretty fast for pretty long. The guys and Chrissy handled it all right. The other girls did 3x3-4x300, getting progessively faster, and it went well. I'm looking forward to seeing what Amé can do tomorrow. I think she's going to run well. 5:10ish, I'd say. Tough race because there is no one in that range for her to run with: a couple girls at sub5 who might go out hard and die, but no one to set a pace with. We'll just have to encourage her...