"Long" Run with Megan

Goal:
12-13 miles

Actual:
12 miles at 7:10 pace

Today, Megan Hovis was kind enough to drive all the way from her home near McAlpine to join me for a long run (medium run for her!) on the concrete sidewalks of uptown and Myers Park. She had just come off a solid tempo run with Bill Shires and I had just come off a solid day of absolutely no running. However, my weak marathoner body was still sore from my weight lifting session with Mark Kane, where he gave me a lifting regime to do 2 times a week. I can barely get below my hips when doing a squat and we determined it stemmed from a weakness in my abs! If you stop by Pura Vida Fitness, you'll see me doing "stir the pot" and "inch worms." Gotta love the names of exercises.

Back to my long run this morning, Megan and I both agreed that we needed to take it easy, which we did for the first mile: 7:46. After our legs woke up, we began rolling at 6:50s-7:00s the rest of the way home. The conversation was so good that I never even looked at my watch to see what kind of pace we were going. Before I knew it, we had already passed through the entire Sugar Creek Greenway and covered the 3 mile Booty Loop!

I was most happy with how easy and relaxed running 7:00 min pace felt for 12 miles. The goal for the next three months will be to increase this pace for some of my steady state long runs and, based on today's effort, I don't believe I will have any problem accomplishing that. Overall, it was great to catch up with Megan and to hear about how her training is going. As always, she is peppy and ready to run many miles in 2011!

On another note, I found out that both Megan AND Ruth will be running the USA 25k Champs in May. Now I just need to convince Meagan Nedlo to skip the track season and meet us on the roads. Regardless, it looks like the three of us will have a lot of fun racing in Grand Rapids, Michigan in just 3 months!