I haven’t run more than 9 miles since last year’s half marathon, but I ran 10 last weekend.

And shattered my old 10 mile PR! By 14 minutes.

Check it out — here are my race times (some are embarrassing — note that my mile time for the marathon is my WALKING pace, though I didn’t walk!).

[previous 10 mi time — Capital Pursuit 2008]

[last Saturday's run — note the epically fast ending at 6:41/mi]

I am definitely giving myself props. And bragging rights.  Not to mention that it was 95° out on Saturday compared to the 50° 2 years ago.  YAY!

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I can’t believe I’m already into week 3 of my half marathon training. So far, so good. I haven’t missed a run yet and I’ve been keeping up with my cross training on my off days (except last Saturday — but I danced my ass off at prom).

Today’s a cross-training day, so I’m going to hook up with my favorite trainer, Jillian Michaels, for some hard core cardio in my living room.

Anyway, my runs have been pretty decently paced so far. I ran outside for my first 6-mile run (in the snow) for week one and managed to keep it at 8’25ish per mile.  Last week’s 7 mi run was on a treadmill and averaged 8’17/mi.  So pretty decent.  If I can keep my pace no more than 8’30/mi on longer runs, I think I’ll have a pretty decent time for the race considering I’ll likely step it up a notch.

Here’s my training plan for this week:

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I rock.

Although I don’t know if I could ever re-run this time or recreate it in any way shape or form, but I did it.

Hit the treadmill hard today with intentions of at least shaving some time off the 25:50whatever I previously held as a 5K PR. Cranked it up cuz another somewhat-elite runner was running next to me (and he didn’t have headphones…probably a real elite runner).

Here’s where it gets tricky though.  I put the incline at 0.  Yeah. totally cheating.  So now I’ve got to see if I can do this OUTSIDE where it counts, but there’s too much ice/snow on the ground right now to think about speed. Plus, treadmills are good for keeping track of speed and pacework, so I figure I’ll get some use out of them…hell, I’m putting a 10th of each paycheck into a savings account to BUY my own treadmill by this time next year (i hope anyway).

Also, it got kinda sketchy towards the end. I was rocking and hauling ass until the last 1K…then I got a major major MAAAAJOR case of painful gas (which I get when I do speedwork, which is why I’m NOT a short-distance runner — mostly out of respect for other people). I wasn’t about to stop on account of that.  I decided that the guy next to me who was the only one in the place NOT wearing headphones could deal with it — he was obviously a runner… he would understand.  I let ‘er rip.  Fortunately for him it was just the loud kind of fart, not the smelly kind.

Anyway, I got one of my goals for 2009 covered. I’m going to keep trying to break that and try to break it outside of course. I should sign up for a 5k to see what I can do in a race setting. I’m excited now!

thank you, Alexi Laiho, for being so hot and rocking at guitar. You pushed me through ANOTHER speedwork workout.

oh, and for anybody who’s interested, I’ve been listening to Children of the Bodom, In Flames and Dethklok during these runs.  I’m hoping to add more COB and some Death and Amon Amarth to the speed collection.  Also, Alexi Laiho is the lead guitarist of COB, in case you were wondering. He’s pretty talented and probably the  best looking guy in the entire genre of metal (unless you consider NIN to be metal…which I don’t, but if you do, Trent Reznor wins).

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today I had an amazingly short but awesome run — set 2 PRs: 8:06/mi and 26:03/5k.

— but —

NIKE PLUS DECIDED NOT TO RECORD THIS INFO!!!  It’s on my iPod, but the workout data from today decided for whatever reason that it did not want to send to nikeplus.com. GRR.

the last two weeks I’ve been watching my average pace per mile on nikeplus.com go from a sad 10:45ish to a little less embarrassing 10:25ish.  Mind you, the 10:45/mi pace was built up over nearly 300 miles and the amount of miles I’ve ran in the past two weeks barely add up to 30, let alone 300.

a month ago i didn’t think i could hit a 9:00 mile.  now i’m running those regularly for 5mi< runs. the most i’ve run since the marathon tho is 6 miles, which is sad, but i’ve got an injury, so i’ll deal with it so i can keep running for years rather than months.

anyway. annoyed. i was pretty proud of those times even tho they’re seriously slow compared to most people and nike+ apparently agreed. grr.

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