Smoke, Fire & Running Long

I woke up this morning around 6:30 in the morning to the sounds of ambulance and firetruck sirens. They sounded close and I was convinced in my morning haze that the city was burning down. ABC news was reporting that a building fairly close to our apartment was in the middle of a 3-alarm fire. We didn't think much of it until we went outside to start our run and felt like we were running through a campfire. It was amazingly bad out considering the building was about a mile away.

We had another fantastic run, pushing our Sunday long run distance to 8 miles. We are sticking to neighborhood runs at the moment since we aren't going far enough to warrant the lakefront path. We have found that many of the little city parks have water fountains in them which is nice to find. We are also going early enough that if we happen to get stuck at lights there isn't any traffic coming so we can cross anyways.

Our paces were :

1. 9:09
2. 8:44
3. 9:05
4. 8:38
5. 8:40
6. 8:36
7. 8:27
8. 8:12

Another run in which we are pleased with the amount of effort that it is taking to run 8:40ish miles. We seem to settle into that pace fairly quickly and find it to be comfortable for these long runs. The average for this run was 8:41. This the very low end of the McMillian pace for us. Pftiz also says to be at 10%-20% slower than your marathon race pace for long runs. That pace would be about 9 min/miles for the 10% slower category. I think we are doing these long runs too fast, which I am ok with at the moment because these aren't exactly "long runs" in the sense of a marathon training long run. As the distances increase and that summer heat gets on us, I am guessing we'll slow down a bit. I don't want to start doing these workouts too hard and have nothing left for important midweek workouts.

There. That was a lot of numbers. Glad we cleared that all up.

Lazy lazy for the rest of Sunday here in the Leah/Jason household. I'm going to do some physicsy work and then the Bulls are on at 12:30....and yes I haven't paid that much attention during the season...but I'm so jumping on the bandwagon. Go Bulls.