5 Mile North Park - Best yet (9.20.11)

I met Kelly to run after work. Before we started, we decided not to run the big hill since Kelly's knee has been bothering her.  During our first mile, we decided we were going to beat our old best North Park time.  Kelly said that meant we were going to beat 45. I corrected her that we had to beat 44:45. Then she said we were going to beat 44:30.  This would be my fastest time ever including last year when I consistently ran  right around 45 minutes.

Jason told us about 1.5 miles into it that we were starting out too fast. Kelly wasn't having any of that and kept pushing me so that we wouldn't burn out and would be consistent.  

We had one bad split of 2:12 and Kelly said to get those back down to 2:06. I thought she was nuts. Then our next split was 2:05 and I made sure to tell her that. The following split was 2:05.  Go us.

Going clockwise I feel like the grade on the back half of the lake is constant uphill. I prefer the other way. At least this time we didn't have to do the big hill. Not running up a big hill helped our time but usually running down the big hill improves our pace. It just feels so much easier not doing that huge hill at the end.  Not doing the big hill made the 2 smaller hills in the last mile seem a lot bigger though.

We beat our goal time by about 2 minutes. Our goal time was a personal best by 15 seconds.  I would like to mention that I'm still sore from body pump. My hips were sore.  Next time Kelly is going to kill me, I'll make sure I'm not sore first.  The 2 times she killed me the most were days that I was sore at the start. At least today I didn't feel like I was going to throw up after.  Today I could not sprint at the end so I think I worked pretty hard.  I mean I tried to sprint at the end but I didn't go fast enough.  Well it was 1:52. Most other sprints at the end were slower than that but I did have one at 1:49 on August 10

At one point Kelly said "Come on Colleen. You need to have a really good run to blog about." (or maybe that wasn't the exact wording.) That was motivating right there.  

Based on today's run, how fast do you think I will run the 10k this weekend?  I won't have a Kelly to push me along!

Today was my best average pace for any training run. I have beat it for 5k races but not even all of them. 

Over an hour after my run, my face was still beat red. I even took a shower in there.  I think it was still red close to 2 hours later but not as red.

Here's my BodyMedia Fit data from the run.  It's crazy how I am so close to my calorie burn goal with such a good run. 

I saw someone at work today wearing their armband. More of them are popping up.