It’s been a long haul the last 3 months or so trying to get this slow body to feel somewhat natural running faster, and so far, so good. Today’s run had 5 miles of tempo running sandwiched by some warm up and cool down miles, and I was very pleased with the result. Average pace for the tempo section of the run was 8:07, which is good 15 seconds a mile faster than what I need to run in DC later this month to break my goal time of 1:50 in the half marathon. Not blistering, by any stretch, but it will be a nice, big PR if I can pull it off.

Here’s the profile of the run. Had a pretty decent amount of hillage in it (and yes, that is a word because I just deemed it so).

My NBA-bound nephew had another exciting basketball game this morning, and since it started a bit later (at 10:00 am), I knew I had time for yet another long and winding run from my city to the city where he would be playing (please, if you’re a regular reader of TBC, don’t make that sound less impressive by commenting about how close the two cities are to one another).

Vance displaying the jump and slide that will propel him to the NBA amid the distraction of someone out of frame robbing the kid in green at gunpoint.

I had time to get up, eat a quick bite, drink some coffee, read some awesome passages about how generous Christians should be (it’s part of a 30 day study I’m doing), and then I kissed the B99 good-bye before heading out into the frigid morning air while trying not to think too much about the warm bed I was leaving behind.

I definitely was not expecting this run to be noteworthy, and I started out at a very easy pace that I held for the first 3 miles. That’s when things started to change, because I had a nice downhill that made my fourth mile quicker, but it felt good and so I went with it. Nothing crazy, mind you, but the longer I ran, the quicker my pace got, and when I’d put my 10th mile in the books, I knew I had a shot to unofficially break my half marathon personal record (I say “unofficially” because this wasn’t a race, but I did officially run the distance), so I decided to finish out the long run with a fast finish.

My next 3 miles were 9:06, 9:02, and 8:41, and when I saw 13.1 on my Garmin, the timer read 2:02:38, which is 50 seconds faster than my fastest half marathon race. Of course, the new PR was very short lived, lasting only about 8 minutes, which is about how long it took me to run the last mile of my run. Dropping off the first mile of the run and adding the last, I realized that I’d bested my brand new time by almost another minute and a half (2:01:13). It’s not often that I’ll be setting PRs twice in one run, and to do it in a training run makes it even sweeter. Can’t wait to get to DC in March and shatter my HM times officially!