a great day for a run...

Saturday morning 01-31-2009:

As we usually do K & I headed down to Lake Michigan to get in the long training run for the week. We met up with all our friends at 8am so it wasn’t an early for day for us this week as K only needed to run 12 miles this week and I bumped it to 13 miles. Since it was nice & warm out when we started at 25 degrees a lot of folks from the group showed up today but the winds were quite brutal out of the SW at 20mph with 30mph gusts…brrrrrr!

I ran about the first 1/3rd of a mile with everyone and as they headed northwards I went southward decided to tackle to headwind start on for the first 6.5 miles to get that challenge out of the way. Since I’m still in a mid-mileage aerobic base training phase I needed to keep my HR in a certain BPM zone. At the turn-around I stopped for 45 seconds to take a couple thermolyte tabs, one eGel and hydrate properly with my 1st endurance EFS & Carboload fluids from the fuel belt and off I set back northward 6.5 miles. The funny thing I have noticed about running long on the lakefront path is even when you think you should have a tail-wind the wind is still hitting you hard because of all the big buildings funneling strong winds out of the west at you…it builds character!

I ended up running the 13 miler in 1:55:58 which is an aerobic building mile pace of 8:55 with an average HR of 140bpm. I have been working on my stronger finishes on these mid-distance runs so I maxed my HR at the end at 153bpm plus I turned a negative split of just over two minutes on the final 6.5 miles…the run felt great :-)

Afterwards is was off to our favorite breakfast place, Schuba’s http://www.schubas.com/ on Belmont for a great feast for all :-)

b