PR Proud

Holy crap this weekend was a total mixed bag kind of thing.  I feel like I should be and I AM proud of the fact that my half marathon run on Saturday was amazingly perfect and blissful and I had a PR.  Yup, I actually totally PR’d my half.  I honestly kind of thought I’d never PR again. I mean, my previous fastest time was last October in San Jose and I was totally trying for it.  I mean, it was hard. I remember every second feeling like a struggle and I wouldn’t say torture but hard and agonizing and I was fighting every single step for that PR.  Saturday felt blissful.

There are some things that might have contributed.  It was a night race. Maybe I do better running at night? I “feel” like it’s hard because I have to sit around all day and wait to run and I mentally do not want to do it.  Saturday was no exception.  I did not want to run at all. It sounded horrible after a full day of living, to drive an hour to go run 13.1 miles.  It seemed awful really.  But perhaps my body actually likes it?  Maybe I am fully awake and therefore it is lovely.  The second biggest factor was weather. Holy hell it was perfect running conditions. Like PERFECTION.  You could not have ordered up better weather.  It was in the low 70’s and had the most amazing cool evening breeze.  That unto itself made the run enjoyable.  Factor 3, it was an out and back flat course.  I like out and back’s because you know you are running 6.55 miles in one direction and you get to see where you have to run back too. On the run back you literally already know where you are at. PLUS my favorite part which is you get to see people going the opposite direction both ways.  It’s nice to see more people. 

Did I mention the course was flat?  It was a nice easy flat beautiful country road kind of run.  There was about a ½ mile section in there that was gravel which is not my favorite but I mustered up all my fight to not let that slow me down because seriously, I was feeling it, every single bit of it.

When I first started running I of course wasn’t sure and didn’t want to run. But the moment my feet started moving I felt good, and I kept feeling better and better. The breeze was great. I started out and decided that I was just going to go as fast as I could or what felt comfortable to me and I didn’t really care what my pace/time was.  In fact so much so that I pretty much didn’t look at my watch for the first mile.  BUT, I knew I was going a pretty fast pace for me.  I knew I was running.  And finally when I saw the mile 1 marker on course I glanced down.  9:17 first mile.  Yup, that’s fast for me.  But I felt great. So I was like okay, conditions are good, let’s roll with it. Mile 2, 9:04 minute mile.  What the hell? I’m not used to this pace.  Mile 3 was 9:14 and then Mile 4 was 9:17 again. At this point I was like let me see if I can get a fast 10k time. We all know my average is right around 10 minute miles.  On a treadmill I don’t even really like to run at a 6.0, I tend to run at a 5.8 speed.  But I was like, hell at this pace, I could probably do a sub 1 hour 10k. Let’s try for that.  All the while in the back of my mind I had visions of a PR swirling thru my head.  Yes, I really did.  But I tried to hold that thought off because at mile 4 you’ve got a lot of race left to go.

So I carried on.  Mile 5 was 9:23 and then Mile 6 hit and it was 9:31.  When my watch was 6.2 mile I glanced down to see 57:45 on my watch.  That blows away my 10k time.  YES. So at this point I was slowing down a bit, but trying to maintain.  I wanted to hit that 6.55 mile turn around and maintain the 9:20 overall average pace I was at.  So this kept me going thru the turn around. And visions of that PR were in fact dancing in my head at this point because I still felt good.

Mike 7 ticked by at 9:41.  Mile 8 was 9:40. Maintaining strong at this point.  Should also point out this is the longest I have ever held this kind of pace before.  And I started doing math in my head. You know that good old Runner’s math.  The kind that while running of course and keep pace you are calculating paces and over all times and rates, etc.  If I maintain this pace, what would my finish time be? What is the present speed at which I am running.  Far too many numbers whooshing by in my head.  Number after number.

But I was of course getting tired.  Who doesn’t get tired eventually. My legs slowed a bit.  Mile 9 was a 9:50 minute mile. Still below my 10 minute mile average pace that I tend to run at.  And then finally I hit mile 10, it was a 10:01 minute mile. I will take it.  I was at 10 miles, I was tired.  My pace was AMAZING for me. And in that moment I knew that baring a huge tragedy or completely stopping that I was going to PR.  I had already banked enough time that if I could keep my last 3 miles anywhere near the 10 minute mile mark a PR was going to happen.

This knowledge carried me thru the last 3 miles.  Sure I was tired. Sure I wanted to be done.  But holy hell, as each distance milestone ticked by I found myself saying things like 2.5 miles to a PR Emily. 2.5 miles, keep going strong.  2.25 miles to a PR.  Etc., etc.  Mile 11 was a 9:54 minute mile. Yippee. Then Mile 12 came and it was 10:22, my slowest mile. But that was my slowest time, holy hell that is typically less than my average pace.  This was epic.  1.1 miles to a PR Emily. Go. Go. Go. 

Somewhere around mile 12.5 we came upon the home stretch where I could faintly see the finisher’s arch in the foreground.  It seemed like a long ways away.  But my watch told me I had half a mile to go.  I was fearing that It was actually going to be farther off than it should have been. And somehow I willed my body to move faster.  You are but moments away from finishing, so what if you are out of breath and have to push and push, will be done in moments. PR, PR, PR.

I got closer and mile 13 went by 10:16. You are going to do this. I was 1/10^th of a mile away from the goal. I saw Chris on the sideline cheering me on. And I knew I was seconds away from my PR.  HOLY shit, batman, I sprinted across the line.  13.11 miles according to my Garmin, so perfectly on really and my watch showed 2:06:34.  Official time would be 2:06:28. I BLEW my PR out of the water.  Funny how a matter of minutes constitutes blowing your PR out of the water.  This put me at a 9:39 pace for the entire race. Or a 6.2 miles per hour pace.  I NEVER run 6.2 miles on the treadmill, not consistently.  Not for any period of time longer than maybe a mile. And yet somehow, on this day, in these circumstances I ran 13.1 miles at this pace.  Never underestimate the circumstances surrounding a race.  Somehow it just makes you excel in a way no other venue can.  I promise you on my own, there is not a chance in hell that I would ever run that pace for that long.  Sometimes even running at a 10:30 minute mile pace is a struggle for 3 miles. 

The entire time I was running and secretly thinking about a PR, I kept saying that I don’t know how, but this marathon training is clearly REALLY paying off.  It doesn’t seem that difficult or complex really of a training plan and yet all be damned if I don’t feel better and feel like I am clearly improving as time passes. It is insane. Which leads me to the idea that I really just need to trust the program and that perhaps it does know what it’s doing and therefore it might actually prepare me to run my full marathon.  Crazy thought I know!

There was nothing particularly that special about this individual event but somehow it just all worked. Chris had a PR too for the record. So there you go.  This crap is working for us.  My Saturday day was just dandy. We took the kids (niece and nephew) to the dog park with my girls and they played.  Mostly we just hung out waiting for the run.  I was a good girl Friday night and Saturday in preparation for the run. I didn’t over eat. All was great.  After the run, which was late night, I even ate decent.   I didn’t count calories or anything but nothing struck me as terribly off. But then that moves to yesterday.

Saturday night I did not sleep well. I would have thought I would have slept like a baby after the run, but instead I came home and I just could not fall asleep like all night.  I tossed and turned. It sucked.  Then Sunday morning I woke up and went and got a dog.  We are babysitting a dog for a week. Amanda my trainer, her sister Anna is in the hospital and she has a little tiny pug dog.  And none of her family are dog people and the poor dog has been locked in the bathroom for days with people randomly checking in on her. I said, hell no, I will watch her.  So I went to Amanda’s and picked up the little girl.  She is sweet as can be and I kind of love her! She fit right in with my baby girls.

But I just woke up Sunday not feeling very energetic with the lack of sleep and the running a half at night.  I didn’t want to do anything. I did not want to go to the gym.  I didn’t want to move much really.  I just played with the dogs. We took them on a walk. We snuggled on the couch.  I watched TV.  And then I ate. I could live with most everything I ate with the exception of one item.  Somehow I opened up a can of Pringles and somehow, not shockingly, I ate the whole thing.  This is what happens when food like this in my house.  And for some unknown reason I let it bother me all day long.  The weekend before I ate a bag of sun chips and somehow that didn’t bother me.  And yet, for some particular reason this was really eating at me.  I think maybe because I was so good with everything else. I wasn’t in full on binge mode so I don’t really understand why I felt compelled to eat it.  And yet I watched Catfish and ate pringle after pringle.

I am sure in the grand scheme of things I will be fine.  I think why it bothered me as well was because of my lack of physical activity during the day. I know I am too hard on myself considering I ran a freaking half marathon the night before.  But I felt gross and yucky for not moving. Whatever, get over it, right? Even after I ate the pringles and blew my calories for the day I decided to not skip dinner. We were having a healthy chicken, baked potato, corn on the cob meal and I was like my body actually needs this so who cares right? Sometimes food wins. Sometimes food is about more than food and sometimes it is needed.

So I ate more, I played with the doggies, I snuggled. Then I went to bed very tired, with 3 doggies on the bed and fell asleep.  I slept well and things felt a little better this morning. But back to Monday work grind. Back to trying to get ahead of work crap.  Why do I procrastinate so much sometimes? Seriously, I can awful! Anyway. Here are the rest of the pics from the weekend. The Instagram posts.  Probably in no particular order and just because.