Distance: 10 miles (woot woot!)
Pace: 9:26/mile
Wine: Not enough to be hung over, but more than one typically consumes before a 10 mile run
I am in Chicago for not one, not two, but three different conferences this week. I am speaking at one of them. Lucky for me, my first long training run falls this very same week. At least the weather will be good. Here's my dirty little dark secret -- I've never run 10 miles outside of a race setting. Sure, I told people my longest run when training for the half was 10 miles, but I was counting my distance by time (this was pre-MapMyRun) and assuming a 10 minute pace. I was probably running much closer to 11, so I did not actually run 10 miles until race day. And 10 miles, even during a race, sucks. It is painful and I always want to quit with every step. This is why I secretly doubt my ability to run a marathon.
Needless to say, I was nervous about running 10 miles alone, mid-week in a strange city on the really terrible sleep schedule that accompanies networking conferences. I was also fairly dehydrated. I bought a giant water and set off. My run was Wednesday. I spent Monday and Tuesday quizzing the locals where I could run a 10-mile route without getting shot or stabbed. To a person, they recommended I run along Lake Michigan. It was a good recommendation, I picked up the Lakeside Trail at Navy Pier and headed north. I was neither stabbed nor shot, and as a bonus, they had restrooms throughout the run.
(Lake Michigan is pretty. This was actually taken from Lincoln Park and that is not the Sears Tower in the background as I later found out by posting a picture on Facebook proclaiming that it was.)
As you can tell by reading this blog, pacing (particularly distance pacing) is not my strong point. So I knew that if I was to survive this run, I needed to slow down. My first mile was 8:36. Too fast. I slowed down bit by bit until I was running a 9:43 at mile 4. This was a good pace. It hardly felt like exercise. It was boring, but the miles ticked away without pain or physical discomfort. I resisted the urge to run faster so that the pace was challenging and turned around at mile 5. This time I headed inland a bit to run through Lincoln Park. I had the brilliant idea to play "Bleed It Out" so that I would be listening to Linkin Park in Lincoln Park and this made me giggle for a good quarter mile. I am hilarious. When that wore off, I thought about my upcoming speech. I thought about work. I thought about clothes and TV and wine and books. Oh, I need an audio book on these runs! I composed much of this blog post in my head. I thought about how much I missed my family. By this time, it was 7:30 Phoenix time, so Husband #1 would be dropping the girls at school. Why not call? My headphones have a small speaker for talking on the phone (which is excellent when you have a touch screen and really fat cheeks that manage to send random texts while you are on the phone), so I theoretically could call them. And I wasn't breathing hard enough to interfere with conversation. So I called. "Hi! I'm almost 7 miles into a run!" How many phone conversations start that way? I spoke to my family for 8-9 minutes, during which time I chalked up almost another mile.
(This is me during a long run. My grandmother used to tell me boredom was a state of mind. My grandmother did not run distance.)
Shortly after hanging up the phone, I hit 8 miles and still felt fresh. No pain, no sweat, no nothing. I'd hardly even made a dent in my water, which was quite remarkable given my initial state of hydration. Having only 2 miles left, I decided to pick up the pace. I dropped to 8:50 and 8:48 for the last two miles and finished strong (and also knowing there was no way I could sustain that pace long-term). More importantly, I finished believing for the first time that my body might actually let me run 26.2. I will just have to find a way to keep my brain awake.
(This was my water after running 10 miles. I may need to work on hydration.)
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