Already tonight I learned that without much effort, when there’s little grade, I’m doing around 10 minute miles; but on the uphills it’s more like 13 or 14 mn, which is not made up for on downhills (maybe 9 mn there). So it doesn’t all even out, as I thought it did; the fact that every run I do has significant hills is part of why I seem to be so very slow! Which does make me wonder why I didn’t do better in the Chris Thater 5K, which was pretty flat. However, I did have trouble pacing myself that day (started too slow), it was really hot and humid, and I do find it more difficult to run on the flat (psychologically and physically too, although I think ChiRunning principles are really helping with that).<\/p>\n
This run (up the “mountain” opposite our house, down to the end of a state game land trail & back) has two very-very-very steep hills (I’m interested in seeing the grade next time). Plus the trail is not mowed yet, so I was running on a narrow trail left by one tire of a truck through waist-high grass, which must have slowed me down too. I left a little late–8:30pm–so it was quite dark by the time I got back. Lovely sunset colors in the sky, and a crescent moon. (which makes me think of my favorite mnemonic:<\/p>\n
\nO moon, how thou deceivest me!
\nThou art not crescent when a C
\nNor yet decreasing when a D.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Yes, it was crescent.) Lots of dogbane on the trail. I startled a groundhog–he startled me too!–who made quite a commotion getting himself up and running away. He must have been napping right near the trail, which hardly ever gets much traffic, let alone foot traffic.<\/p>\n
On the way back up the long, long hill, a minivan pulled over. The driver, a nice woman accompanied by at least one teenage girl, said that “the girls” had thought I was bleeding, so she turned around to see if I was OK! Very sweet of them, but I can’t imagine why they would have thought that. I wasn’t wearing any red, but it was dusk. Unless the Forerunner, which I wore up near my elbow, looked strange? Anyway, they were nice, and I was pleased to see that I wasn’t gasping for breath as I talked to them. I guess it doesn’t say much about my running form for people to think I’m injured!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Medium run: 4.1 miles, 50:30, AHR 154, RPE 3-8; splits 10:02, 14:02, 13:24, 10:20. I LOVE the Forerunner! I am SO GLAD I got it now; it’s going to be incredibly helpful–I had no idea how much. It tracks my pace constantly, a very useful piece of information I haven’t had before, on top of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/marathon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/marathon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/marathon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/marathon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/marathon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/marathon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/marathon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/marathon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/marathon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}