Potentially Wet, Definitely Fast Week

So far, this week has been pretty productive. It almost wasn’t on Monday though. We decided to “sleep in” and run an hour later Monday morning. When I got to the gym it started to sprinkle. Off in the distance I could see lightning. My only thought was, who’s going to show up?

Well, everyone who said they’d run at 6 did! We laughed about who would or wouldn’t show up inside the gym and then decided it was time. As we stepped out, the sky opened up. I mean, it...opened...up! I hadn’t seen rain come down that hard in a long time. If only we had met at 5! We even saw runners from one of the other groups (runners who run in ANYTHING) come to the gym saying they weren’t going out in this downpour.

We stood there and watched as our Monday run was getting washed out. Still unsure about what we were going to do, it suddenly stopped raining. What a difference 10 minutes makes. We looked at each other and decided to chance it. As it turns out, we never saw another drop of rain. In fact, there were parts of our run that were dry as a bone. Yes, Kentucky weather.

Wednesday was supposed to be an easy day. As it turned out, we did speedwork. A nice “up tempo” run. While it felt good to do a speed session, I like to be prepared (mentally) for those kind of runs. Oh well, Thursday, Thursday will be a nice slow run before the 20 on Saturday.

Nope.

We started off at a nice steady pace. I was enjoying the leisurely pace. But then around mile 2 we started increasing our speed. Then we made a turn to go 5 miles (which is what I wanted to do). But our pace just kept increasing. In fact, my last mile this morning clocked in at 8:10. That’s pretty fast for me.

Fortunately, I have a day of recovery and then the 20 miler. I actually can’t wait to run this distance. Yes, a marathon is another 6.2 miles, but there is something mentally awesome about reaching that 20 mile mark.