Thursday 10/22 - Progressive Run

I would have preferred to run this earlier in the week with the 1/2 marathon coming up on Sunday, but I needed to have a good workout to give me confidence for the race and a feel for what kind of goal time is realistic on Sunday. I saw on Bill's blog that he and Sam had both run really strong progressive runs so I felt a little bit of pressure to have a good run. The last few times I had run progressive runs, I either really struggled to finish a mile at 5:30 or I didn't even finish the 5:30 mile which had been kind of depressing. I ran at lunch after the storms had moved through and the temperature was around 70 degrees. My goal was to start at 7:00 pace, drop 15 seconds every mile until I couldn't hit my target pace. I felt pretty good and kept feeling great as the run progressed. My splits were 7:05, 6:51, 6:31, 6:09, 5:56, 5:42, 5:28, 5:15, 1/4@5:08 pace. I felt really good on the 5:42 and 5:28 mile and felt like I could have kept cruising for several more miles at that pace which makes me feel good about the race on Sunday. On the 5:15 mile I was a little slow the first 1/4 and was worried I was only going to hit 5:20 - 5:25 pace, but I kept pushing hard and got back on track and finished it right on pace. I hadn't expected to still be going after the 5:15 mile, but I decided to see what I could do. I hit 1:17 for the 1st quarter and knew there was no way I could get my pace down to 5:00 so I shut it down there and did a 1 mile cooldown. I felt really good being able to hit the faster times that I was struggling to hit a couple months ago. The cooler weather makes a huge difference for me because the heat and humidity really slow me down.