22K - Not Bad, Not Bad at All

When I was in Maui, we stopped in at a Barnes and Noble to pick up a book to read on the flight home, as I wasn't into the book I was reading - the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - anyone? Anyone got an opinion for me on it?   I'm about 1/3 through and it's not keeping my attention well at all...a lot of people loved it but I'm meh so far.  Anyways, I picked up a book called "Marathon - the Ultimate Guide" by Hal Higdon, who's a contributing editor of Runner's World and have pretty much read the whole thing (yeehaw, book #7 for this year - only five more books to go and another 2010 goal knocked off!).  Since I'm not doing any clinics this year, I've been doing a lot of reading on my own.  This book is great for beginners and experienced runners, and I've gleaned some useful insights, the most important being that for the first marathon, a time goal shouldn't be the main goal but basically finishing the marathon while enjoying myself.  OK, I know you non-runners are thinking "how the heck can you enjoy yourself running for four plus hours?!"  Well, it might not be a picnic, but being able to take in the beautiful scenery, the spectators cheering, the great volunteers and crossing the finish line with a smile on my face should be the focus for my first and time goals (I still want Boston!) can always come later.  So I've changed my frame of mind from having a specific time in mind to finishing with a smile on my face.

OK, so on with our run today - we decided to rest out a new route and ran the Galloping Goose Trail in Vic and ran 5.5K out one direction and back and then the other direction and back to the car.  It was a really nice trail I gotta say - secluded in some parts but relatively flat with only a few hills.  I ran the same pace as Hubs as Hal was saying that the long slow runs should be just that...long and significantly slower than race pace which I wasn't doing....6:15 - 6:30 is what I'm targetting for race pace, but I was running my LSDs at that pace and burning out by the end.  Not good!  I think for this run, we were running around 6:45 to 7:00 for most of the distance, and it made a huge difference in how I felt at the end.  I was definitely tired, but not drop dead exhausted.  It took us almost 2 1/2 hours to finish because we were running so slow but I had something left in the tank at the end.  Also, my stinking knee was bugging me again - started to ache around 17K so I had to do some walk breaks to get through it.  I admit I've been bad at doing my exercises, but am going to buckle down.  So overall - a pretty good run today - I'll take it!

PS.  Argh, I think my back/neck is out again - chiro, here I come.  :(