18K - Is Gin the Secret?

Last night when Hubs got home from playing ice hockey, he opened the car door and let out a huge groan...I guess he got tangled up with some other guy and they both went down and he pulled his lower back. Gah! Poor fella. So needless to say, I was on my own again for my run. For today's long run, I decided to head downtown as Hubs had some stuff to do plus the local boat race was on which was right on my running route.

For some reason I was ravenous this morning - I woke up at 3am absolutely starving so had to actually get up and get a snack, and then woke up at 8am dying of hunger...that gnawing, dizzy kind of hungry. Weird, as I'd eaten a good dinner last night. This has happened a lot recently so I went to the doctor to get it checked out and my sugars are fine, so the doctor thought that maybe I just burned off my food faster so needed to eat more. I was though uhhh...I seem to have plenty of extra fat reserves ready for the burning, why can't I burn that!! Sigh.

Anyways, I was worried about my blood sugar dipping too low, so I decided to test out eating some whole grain toast slathered with nutella in addition to my normal banana as pre-race fuel. I grabbed a Jet Blackberry flavoured Gu (extra caffeine in this bad boy - and not bad tasting, kinda like jam) to take at the halfway point.

It was incredibly windy downtown today, perfect conditions for a boat race but not so hot for running. It was hard to push through the wind, but overall I felt great - my feet were light and my splits were on target. I stopped a few times to check out the boats - tons of people were out so I was weaving and bobbing a lot to get around people. My right knee started aching around the 12K point though (I will admit, I've been bad and not been doing my exercises) so I had to really slow it down and take some walk breaks, which you can see from my splits:

1K: 6:05
2K: 6:24
3K: 6:04
4k: 5:54
5K: 6:07
6K: 6:08
7K: 6:35
8K: 6:12
9K: 6:02
10K: 6:18
11K: 6:17
12K: 6:42
13K: 7:02
14K: 6:30
15K: 7:12
16K: 6:33
17K: 6:55
18K: 6:51

Average pace was 6:26 and 1022 calories burned! Woot. That hopefully will make up for some of my alcoholic indiscretions *ahem* over the past few days. I thought today's run was going to be a repeat of the 16K shite-fest, but it was one of my better ones of late. Was the toast/nutella combo to credit? Maybe not running for the last two days? The copious amounts of gin I consumed? Who knows...but I'm definitely going to do the toast/nutella combo in the future...I might leave the gin out though...maybe. Heh.