I guess I’m back

"What to do, what to do?"

That’s what kept running through my head this week. Should I race the IBM Uptown Classic 10K on Sunday, OR, should I just run the 12-mile Progressive workout run on Saturday?

Although it would have been a good opportunity to chase away the demons from my head by confronting them in a race that I WILL finish, I opted to run on Saturday instead.

For the few non-runners that read this, the “Big Fire” 12 mile progressive works like this:
You want your 11th mile to be at 10K pace (6:30min/mile). You then want to run the alst mile as fast as possible. Miles 10, 9, 8 etc are all 15 seconds faster per mile than the previous one, meaning my first mile was a 8:45 mile. Chris and Ken were there, which was a nice surprise. Chris has a ½ Ironman this coming weekend in Conroe, TX, so he was just going to run this whole thing easy, but Ken is also running Dallas (potentially under 3 hours) so I had a running partner.

We did great. The deadly thing that is so easy to do here is to run too fast too quickly. The workout is surprisingly difficult, so you really have to behave and run the speeds you’re supposed to. Long story short. We kicked butt. The last few miles were all under 7 min miles, and the very last mile was not much over 6 mins, including a good sub 6 min /mile pace for the last 1/3 of the mile.
I can’t tell you how happy I am to run a good long workout. 1hour and 24 minutes total run time.

Best of all, I decided to not eat Hammer Gelsbefore, or during the run. In past Big Fires I’ve always eaten one 10-15 minutes before, and one at the half way point. Today, I decided to just run on whatever energy I had, and it was a really nice surprise to see that I did not fade.