10 Miles and an Ice Bath

Day 40
10 miles at 10:42/mile pace

If there ever was a day I wanted Christina to sleep in today was the day. I was not in the mood to run 10 miles (like, anyone wakes up and says "Geez, I can't wait to run 10 miles), but alas, Christina was waiting for me at 5:30 this morning. I had dropped off water at Virg's and at the clubhouse on my way over, so I was a little late. Apparently, not late enough. :) I was feeling nauseous (again. I think it's the anticipation of running 10 miles) and so I only took a few bites of a granola bar.

However, we started off strong and the run was--dare, I say it--quite pleasant. For me, up until mile 8. Then it got hard. Really hard. But the first 8 miles went by fairly quickly.

It was pretty uneventful, though we did comment that rarely have we felt this good running. If only all runs felt like this.

We averaged 10:34(!) for the entire run, finishing in 1:45:35, which I felt was great. We stopped to drink our water, but those were our only walking breaks and they were .02 miles at the most. So, we ran 10 miles without stopping. Yay! Another first for me. Our target pace for a 2:15 half-marathon is 10:12/mile, which I think is totally doable, especially since the course is mostly downhill.

Our splits were:
Mile 1: 10:23
Mile 2: 10:32
Mile 3: 10:40
Mile 4: 10:36
Mile 5: 10:28
Mile 6: 10:43
Mile 7: 10:11
Mile 8: 10:40
Mile 9: 10:37
Mile 10: 10:45

During mile 6, I got a sideache and had to slow down. But I ran through it. It was one of the only two miles I didn't hit the pace--off by a second. (Christina hit the pace on all 10 miles because she was just a step or two--or 10, in the case of the last mile--ahead of me in both cases). Mile 9 and 10 were really hard. Especially the last half mile of the entire run. I was talking out loud to myself telling myself to keep going. That I couldn't stop yet because I'd never run 10 miles without walking. Today was going to be the day. Yada, yada, yada. Mostly it was trying to quiet the little negative voice telling me I couldn't do it and to just stop. Ha. I showed it. I did do it and I almost pulled it out of bag at a 10:42 pace. What happened was that my watch showed 10 miles, but the distance alarm (it beeps every mile) hadn't beeped and so it would only calculate 9.99 miles. I slowed waaaaaay down until it crossed over to the 10 miles and beeped, but it was 3 seconds slower than I thought it would be. Oh well. 3 seconds and 1 second shy on two miles out of ten is still awesome.

What was even more awesome was that I finally figured out how to get my watch to show me the pace of each mile in a scrolling fashion as we run it, so I always know if we're on target. What I had been doing was adding 10:42 as each mile passed so I knew what time we had to cross the next mile at. For example, I'd say "okay, mile 1 is at 10:42, mile 2 is at 21:24, mile 3 is at 32:06, ect." Then, I could check the overall time each mile and see if we were under. If you can imagine, the more miles we ran, the harder it was to calculate them in my head and remember. And adding 10:42 isn't exactly the easiest math to do while you're oxygen deprieved and tired. Also, I never knew if we needed to speed up until it was too late to do so. So anyways, Hillary, you aren't the only watch dummy out there. I've had this watch 2 years and I just figured out you could do that.

The feature came in handy when we stopped for our water, because I knew how much longer we had until we were back on pace. And so we'd run a little faster to catch back up to our pace.

I stopped at Maverik on the way home from Christina's and grabbed a bag of ice. All my runner friends have been telling me that you have to try an ice bath after these long runs. And so, today, I decided to do it. I poured coldish bath water, dumped the bag of ice in and sat in it for 10 minutes. The water was too warm because all the ice melted pretty fast, but it was still cold. And it did help quite a bit. I was surprised. I'm going to be adding that to my regimen from now on out. I took a 30 minute catnap and then spent the day at Deseret Peak. After we got home, I took like a 2 hour nap but I think it was more because of the sun than anything. It's hard work sitting in the sun.

One last thing--sorry, this post is really long, but I want to remember this for "next" time--when Kandiss and I were training for the marathon, we'd put water out every mile or mile and a half. Wade swore it was slowing us down. He would only take it every three or four miles. I thought he was nuts. But, I never felt like this on our runs. We were running a lot slower--averaging 12 minute miles. Maybe he does know what he's talking about.

Two weeks until the triathlon and three weeks until the half. I'm getting excited. I really think I'm going to be able to run the entire thing. Crazy. I never would've thought this body could run 13 miles without walking.

We're almost there!