The Long Run Done Fast – Oct 11,2008

I was happy to know that today's long run was "only" 11 miles ! Having done 15 and 16 miles in the past 2 weeks, this was relatively a shorter run for me. So, I decided to run with the faster group (the Greg's group that does 9:00-9:30 min/mile). These guys usually run through some hills and start about half an hour earlier (at 6:30 am). I reached the spot about 5 min late but the group was still waiting for some early starters who finished about 4 miles starting at 5:45 am ! These guys were doing 18 miles.

We started running at 6:40 am. There were about 14 runners and this group had more men (12) unlike the more than 10min/mile group that I usually run with which has more girls. The interesting part is that our pace leader (of 9:00-9:30 min/mile) is a women (in her 40's). After a slow start, we picked up pace and finished about 3.5 miles in 32 min (about 9:00 min/mile). This was a good pace for me as I am targeting doing atleast 6.5 miles an hour so that I can do the DRC half marathon, 13.1 miles, (on Nov-4) under 2 hours. We took a 2 minute break so that everyone can have water etc.. I took my first and the only packet of "Gu" gel at this point. We proceeded to do another 3 miles and took a break at a park to have some water. We did about 6.65 miles in an hour. This was a moderate difficulty route since it had some small challenging hills. We went back to our starting point after running another 2.5 miles. Took a water break again here and went to do another 2 miles. I was happy to see that finished 11 miles in 1:40:16 which comes to 9:06 min/mile. This is the perfect pace at which I want to run the half marathon. This doesn't count the breaks that we took (3 breaks of 2 min each). Looks like all those interval and tempo runs on weekdays are finally paying dividends in increasing the speed !

When I started this marathon program, my average speed for 9 miles used to be 4.8 miles an hour. I have improved about 1.8 miles an hour to 6.6 miles/hour with 3 months of training ! I hope I can improve at least another 0.5 miles an hour in the next two months. This would be a great pace to have going into the marathon and I might just break the 4:00 hour barrier although I am targeting 4hr 30 min right now. Let's see what the next 2 months have in store for me !

Activity	Type	Activity	Type	Miles	Time (HH:MM:SS)	Avg. Pace (min/Mile)	Avg. Speed	Calories Burnt	Avg. Heart Rate
Morning	Morning	Evening	Evening
Running	Long Run			11.01	1:40:16	9:06	6.6	1419	155