FIRST RUN OF THE SEASON WITH PMC

Me, in yellow, around mile twelve of Saturday's sixteen mile run with Portland Marathon Clinic.

It's funny, during the week I cannot for the life of me get to work by 9:00am. That's my goal, but we have pretty flexible hours, so despite trying I'm always a tad bit late. I just have the hardest time getting out of bed. Saturday morning I arrived early to the Portland Marathon Clinic training run, getting to Mountain Hard Wear downtown at 7:45am and feeling more awake than I do most mornings at 9:30am. Go figure.

Saturday morning was my first run of the season with PMC. I would have joined up a little bit earlier, but as I've noted, my Saturdays have been tied up recently. I almost skipped out, as I had most all of Saturday to myself, which is exceedingly rare, and I could have done my miles at any time after sleeping in. However, I know how hard that can be because I usually put it off until the late afternoon and then suffer through the heat and boredom. So, despite not knowing anyone going to PMC, I went anyways.

The run went great! The schedule said an option of either 12, 14, or 16 miles and I planned on doing 14 miles. However, you don't want to be that one dude who turns around at mile 7 instead of mile 8 so I ended up doing the whole 16 miles and feeling pretty good the entire time. I ran with the 3:30 group, which normally does a 9:45 pace, but the leader was gone so we "paced" ourselves to a 9:25. That included slower warm up and cool down miles, the bulk of them were in the 9:10 to 9:15 range. It all felt pretty good!

I haven't ran more than a half marathon distance since taking a break for overtraining syndrome back in February. I was a little worried that sixteen miles would be a bit tough on my legs, being three miles more than my recent longest, but surprisingly I felt pretty good. Never really broke down, they got a little sore and tired, but normal sore and tired. It felt like a sixteen miler when I'm in shape for a marathon. All at a faster pace than most sixteen milers I have done. So that was really encouraging.

Now, I know that was probably just a freakishly good run. Sometimes you have them. So I won't let my head get too big. It was nice though to feel like maybe I'm on my way back to decent shape. I have the Bald Peak Half Marathon this weekend and that will be a really good test of my fitness. I don't think there is anyway I beat last year's time, but it will be a fun challenge without much pressure in regards to time.