run then a swim...part one

Saturday morning July 5th 2008:

After only a couple hours of sleep due to 4th of July celebrations the evening before with friends at their homestead K & I headed down to Montrose Harbor to run with our Saturday morning Chicago Marathon CARA training groups for our long run by the lakefront. My 6am start time arrived much too quickly that morning!

As I started running with our 8 minute mile pace group I didn't feel to bad but the sun was strong that early morning on the lakefront. Today we were on a 13 mile training run so the pacing by the group leaders was spot-on for the early miles. As we headed southward along the lake the path that goes from North Ave beach to Ohio St beach is asphalt with concrete breaker walls to hold back the lake so this region is always the warmest region to run on. I was able to hold onto the group through the turn-around but I noticed on the way back northward they were surging the pace several times for which I was able to reel them in twice but by mile ten several people dropped the pace bigtime as I just continued to run at an 8 minute mile pace.

I finished with 3 other people from our group as our run time for 13 miles was 1:43:39 for a mile pace of 7:58 with an average HR of 138bpm and a max HR of 151bpm. I was happy that I stuck with my own proper pace especially after just racing a hilly 10k the morning before and cycling repeats the evening before that. I had to run with fatigued legs but it was a good mental learning challenge as I chaulked it up to experience for the half IM run in race coming up all too soon ;-)

Also I will have to wear my hydration fuel belt for the next run because we did not have enough fluids this morning...

More to follow later about the swim portion of the morning...

b