The road to 13.1: Ice, ice, baby

Right before I went outside to start my car this morning, I pulled up the Windows Sidebar (hooray Vista!) and looked at the current weather.  At the time, the temperature was a balmy 5 degrees F.  The thought of going back to bed briefly crossed my mind; instead, I added an extra layer and made my way to Borgess Run Camp.  The morning started with a clinic on dynamic stretching; after the clinic, we put the new knowledge to good use and stretched.  Then, we ran.  I did a decent job of controlling my start this morning, and that helped me as the run progressed.

Before I headed outside, I downed a packet of GU Energy Gel.  It got me through the first 3 or so miles rather nicely. About the 2.5-mile mark, I experienced a rather intriguing little problem:  My eyelashes started to freeze together.  Had it been lashes on the top freezing to other lashes on top, it wouldn’t have been quite as big of a deal; unfortunately, though, they were bonding with their opposite numbers.  Not good.  I spent a couple hundred yards working on separating the lashes of my left eye.  Then, as I tried to down a second tube of GU (Chocolate Outrage flavour, with added caffeine, by the way), I found that it had started to freeze.  I had a difficult time getting it out of its little tube.  While I didn’t really need a reminder that it was cold out there, that clarified things for me.

Just before I got back to the Borgess Health and Fitness Centre, I had to climb this little hill.  It wasn’t really that steep, but it certainly felt that way at the time.  I survived, though, and I finished at a strong clip.  Here are the results:

Run #5:  5.03 miles, 56:38, 11:15.5/mile

I’m pretty happy with that outcome.  If I can keep up similar paces, I’ll be around 2.5 hours for my half marathon, and a little shy of 3 hours for my 25K two weeks later.    I wouldn’t mind getting the pace down a little bit, but … that will come, or it won’t.  For now, I’ll be happy with the fact that I just ran the farthest I’ve run since I tore my hamstring, and that I put together a decent pace.