Mixing It Up: Long Run Style

Wilson and I headed out the door this afternoon with absolutely no clue what distance we were going to run. 10K Race was on the schedule, but uh . . . we sort of slept through our 10K race (oops!). When we got to Prospect Park, I asked whether Wilson would be cool with us just picking random trails to run along, rather than using the same old boring 3.35-mile park loop we tend to frequent. He seemed pretty into this idea, so off we went. I let Wilson lead the way, since he's a tiny bit more familiar with the random trails in the park than I am. Let me tell you , we had a BLAST, and the trails totally kicked our butts (in a good way, of course). It was quite a bit more difficult than I expected it to be . . . lots of hills and stairs and cobblestone to battle. But as I told Wilson, "I think it's good to pick an unfamiliar route every once in a while. After all, we're not exactly going to be familiar with the route we have to run at the half-marathon."

So we snaked along random inside trails/paths until we eventually found our way back out to the main loop, somewhere around 3.2 miles. From there, we decided we'd fininsh out the loop (a little over a half-mile), and then run one full loop to finish up at just over 7 miles. Despite the difficult terrain we faced for the first half of the run, I was pleased to see our pace ended up just barely over 10:00/miles. I thought about pushing the run to 9-miles, since I actually felt REALLY strong (like back to marathon-training-Irish-Cream-strong), but Wilson convinced me it might actually be smart to finish the long run where we were, and thus, finish feeling like some kind of running goddess (instead of a complete and total running loser, like in recent weeks). I must admit, it was a HUGE confidence boost to feel so great throughout the entire run . . . especially given the fact that we were pushing ourselves through some crazy hills (and I, being the smart girl I am, had just run some intense stair sprints the day before). Yay, long runs (and other annoyingly giddy cheers)!

Okay, we just ate a HUGE dinner of spare ribs and red-skinned mashed potatoes, so I'm going to have to give in to the food coma that's been slowly taking over my body . . . but it couldn't hurt to, once again, wish a Happy Mother's Day to my mama, and all you other super-moms out there! Hope it was a great one!