Someone needs to apply the brakes

'cause it sure ain't me.

ORN: 6.37 miles, 51:34, outside with some decent wind gusts. I'm pretty sure that I took off a bit too fast on this one - I was a little ahead of Sunday's run when I hit a turning point, and today was about .75 miles longer. The difference wasn't much, but the extra 5-10 seconds per mile probably slowed me down a bit at the end. I wasn't running on empty, but I had definitely hit a slow spot in the middle of my run, and it took probably a mile or so to get my stride going again.

This change in speed is actually giving me some problems - I used to have a very methodical, almost metrinomic, pace for my longer runs. 6 miles, 8 miles, 10 miles, I would hit almost the same pace per mile for all of them; never pushing much faster, but, once I started doing my long marathon-training runs, I could sustain that same pace to mile 12, 14, 16 and even 20. I'm not sure that I can maintain my current pace for almost 4 hours - and I'm a little aprehensive. If I start out too quickly on race day, it's going to blow my chances of finishing anywhere close to my super-secret goal time. I'd be lucky to finish it at all.

I'm probably going to have to go back to the dreadmill, and locate some definitive mile markers on my outdoor routes, and then try to set a strategy that will keep my pace down on my long runs. It's nice that I'm speeding up - I just kind of wish that it had happened next month. Oh well - I'll take it.