No Pain

That's my new mantra. "No Pain"

I ran 10k on Sunday morning and I kept saying to myself over and over "no pain". Well, it seemed to work. Had one of the best runs I have had since June. Not super fast but I felt like I have almost got my running endurance back. Ran the first two miles without stopping or slowing down then took about 30 seconds to fix my Ipod. I can always find a good excuse for a break! Ran another mile solid back to the house where I had some water waiting and got re hydrated and then took off for what I had planned just to be another couple miles. The run felt so good that when I started getting close to 5 I decided to see what kind of 10k time I would end up with. Needless to say I wasn't racing or even trying to push the pace, just a relaxed pace run.

At mile 5 my legs felt great and strong. Guess all the hard biking was paying off. The PF in my foot was starting to rear its ugly head some but I just kept my mantra going and it was all good. Before I knew it I hit the 6.2 mark at 1:04:22. I didn't think that was too bad considering I wasn't even trying to do a tempo run. That ended up being a 10:22 pace and about dead on where I should be on my long, slow, steady runs. The weather was pretty nice as long as you were in the shade so at times I really felt like I could have ran forever. Great run and brought a lot of my confidence back even though the foot problem is still there. I'd have to say its about where it was just before I really hurt it in June. Some icing and a couple days of no running will help it.

Sunday afternoon I even got some biking in. I haven't even been back on the bike since the Big Dam Bridge 100 so I was glad to get on it again. Met up with James, Russ and Heather for the regular Cruiser 1:30pm Sunday ride. We had an awesome ride. Since the three of them are constantly training for triathlons, we worked on 20 minute hard intervals. It actually ended up being more like 20 minute races to see who could hang on. I really wasn't into pushing quite that hard since I hadn't been on the bike in a couple weeks but I hung in there ok. Heather and James pretty much left me and Russ in the dust most of the time. Heather has a new tri bike too and that thing is fast in the flats.

We had some pretty strong head winds at times but even with that there were times we were hitting 24 mph flat out with no help or drafting. It was a good hard ride and just what I needed. Right at 24 miles with a 17.4mph average. Not the fastest average but the wind on Highway 31 was brutal, probably 4 miles of a 15mph head wind made it hard to keep the 17-18 average. Also have to factor in the hills on Mt Tabor, Mt Carmel and 89. I did have to use my running mantra many times to get through it as my quads were screaming a few times. Good ride though!