Flying miles

Did my what is now becoming a standard Monday evening run with the Slattery's pub group. I begin with a nice easy jog over to Scott Kukel's place of business (1.5 miles?) from where I work, and from there we jog the 2+ miles to the pub. Follow that with the main workout of a 5K, topped off with the jog back to my place of business which is at least 1.5 miles again for about 7.5 mile, if not more for Mondays. Works out great with the free food after the run and ample amounts of social time to boot.

With the Evergreen Town Race coming up this Sunday I wanted to run the Lookout Mountain road at least once more but decided to run earlier in the week. It can be a fairly tough workout on the ankles with the fast downhill running I do. Today was no exception. Fortunately, Scott agreed to meet me for the run since he'd never visited that area before. We kept the pace more or less conservative on the way up, stopped at the 3 mile area, gave me a break for the call of nature, and back down the mountain we came. Only this time would be different.

Normally, I can run fairly quickly (in today's standards) down Lookout. Often times I will hit roughly 4:50-4:55 mile times in some of the steeper sections and anywhere from 5:00-5:30 for the heavily switch backed mile stretches. The final mile down I usually do about 5:10 if I'm pushing at all with about a 4:58 being the fastest since I'm usually running alone when I do it. With Scott running along side me, I went harder than I normally would go, simply because he has greater natural speed than I do these days. From mile 3 to mile 2 we blazed a path like nothing I'd ever done before. Although I missed actually seeing the 2 mile marker, I know roughly where it is, give or take a meter but when I looked down at my watch I saw 4:22! Since I'd never run it so hard prior to this run with Scott I immediately thought that this could never be so I kept going, pushing more and more, looking with great interest for the 2 mile marker since I was growing more and more tired. Finally I saw that we were a long way past the marker so I slowed down and checked my watch. Even then it read 5:08. Shazaam, Sgt Carter!

Running with Scott was definitely a boost. The following mile from 2 to 1, we jogged easily, checking out some of the eye candy riding up the hill, making us comment several times that maybe we were running in the wrong direction. Since this was going to be a short mileage day, I told Scott that I was going to push it during the final mile back to the parking lot. He said he'd be up for that, so we took off again. This stretch has a few tighter turns than the first mile we'd done but was also a little steeper in the first half so it somewhat made up for it. I simply leaned forward and put most of what I still had into the run for the car. A group of cyclist were standing at the junction of trail section that eventually leads up to Windy Saddle and when we passed I heard them comment they'd never seen two guys run so fast. But after that first mile, my legs were certainly feeling the brunt of our climb and subsequent descent and so I know I'd slowed a little, but not by much. That section that I had only previously run 4:58 in, was run by 4:31 by me, and 4:38 by Scott. This was a great feeling since on the way up, Scott mentioned to me that the first mile marker was dead on with his Garmin's reading. Great run tonight but will the track workout punish us tomorrow?

Post run, grub at Fuddruckers... hehe, funny name. Don't switch any letters! :)

Oh, also, major congrats to Bruce T. who just accepted a nice job out in California. We saw him as we started our climb. Too bad he'll only be around for another 2+ weeks but sounds like a great opportunity.