I might be a bit faster than I thought

So, as I mentioned in the big announcement post below, I'm training for this Rock and Roll Half Marathon by myself since Leah is busy growing people. This is a new experience for me as I've always had a run partner, Leah (in case that wasn't clear), and she always took care of the details. She'd schedule the runs, set the pace, and make sure we hit all the milestones.

Well, she still takes care of all the scheduling and motivating in her new capacity as Coach Leah, but I have to pace myself. The problem is, I haven't run seriously since Chicago, 2007. Yep, that's a long time. We had a few half-hearted attempts at training, but mostly we were busy drinking at Sheffield's and being lazy. And then it was winter...and we still drank and were lazy, but now we had an excuse. It was too coooooooold!

But now there's no excuses and we're running again. We did three miles together (4 on sunday) at a slow pregnant lady pace up until it was time for me to start training which, while establishing a nice base, didn't give me much of an idea as to what pace I could really run. Having started up again, it seems that my legs are a bit ahead of my breathing. A "comfortable pace" for my legs is definitely somewhere in the 8 minute range, but my lungs have generally disagreed.

But today for my pace run, in which I was shooting for a 9 mile pace, my legs and my lungs lined up. I started out with an 8:45 mile in which I was kind of all over the lap. I'm not used to running with a garmin (Leah's always handled that end of things) and I got kind of caught up in the pace reading. I'd look down and it'd say 9:30 and I'd be all "oh shit" and then I'd look down and it'd say 8:02 and I'd be all "oh shit". Lotta shit that first mile. But then I got to the lakefront path and settled in nicely. My second mile was 8:10 and my last mile, when I tried to slow down a bit, was 8:20. A bit faster than I expected but I wasn't tired and it didn't feel that fast (yep, I know what you're thinking, that was 90% because of the nice weather. And you're right).

So I'm going to just live with the faster pace. Looking at McMillen, it seems that a 24 or 23 minute 5k will get me to around a 1:50 1/2, which would be nice. So I think I'm going to shoot for that. I have a 5k coming up in a bit and that should give me a better idea of my expected pace. I'll probably try to keep a comfortable 9 minute mile pace for my long run tomorrow and then go from there. Of course, when the weather gets hot, I'll get a lot slower, but right now the weather's perfect and I'm going to keep my legs turning over as fast as I can.

Oh, and I'm tracking my runs at the excellent running site Run. Track. Run. You should check it out. I'll have Leah show me how to get the graphs posted on here so I can show my milage graphs each week.