My final long run before the Seattle Rock 'n Roll ½ marathon had me running in a section of town called West Seattle. For the New York-based readers, it is similar to the "West End" in Long Beach. As it's now crunch time for both the runners and the triathletes, the normal gang is sometimes split up as the triathletes are doing their long bike rides, as opposed to their long runs, on Saturdays. Because of this, it gets more challenging for Coach to support both groups.
As such, Coach Lesley asked me about getting to West Seattle about an hour earlier than the originally scheduled time for a few reasons that made sense. Getting up even earlier on a weekend is typically not something that I am a fan of. I thought about it and decided to do it even though Marc wondered why I didn't just do my run on my own and he'd help me out with fluids, etc. Given that the weather forecast was looking pretty nice and I knew the views would be pretty stellar of Mt. Rainier and the Olympic Mountains, I didn't want to miss it.
As soon as I started running along Alki Beach, I was SO GLAD that I started earlier. It felt pretty warm even before 7am and the sun was out. It was a pretty nice course, but I had business to take care of my run. I was assigned a "cut-down run", which basically meant that I needed to get faster as the run went on. The 1st and 11th miles were supposed to be warm-up and cool-down miles, so that left 9 miles for me to do some math.
The course was pretty flat with the exception of one mile that had me huffing and puffing quite a bit (ok, I was swearing too). That mile was pretty hard for me to improve upon my pace from the previous mile, but other than that, I did better than I expected. It's pretty hard for me to manage my pace to an exact time, so I tried to get within 5 seconds (pace per mile) of what Lesley told me to do. But overall the 2nd half of my run was definitely quicker than the 1st half, so I was pleased even though something tells me I went a bit harder than I was supposed to (oops).
When I hit the end of mile 10 to start my final mile, I tried to tell myself to make it a cool down mile and go slower but I think my body just wants to just finish the run, so I ran the last mile at a pretty fast clip (more oops). Fortunately when I hit 11 miles, I still had about a ½ mile to walk to my car so that kind of worked out as a "pseudo cool down" which also included some stretching.
I still had lots to do after the run, including heading to Pike Place Market to get some newly caught salmon for a dinner party we were hosting later. As Marc is not a seafood fan, I don't have many opportunities to perfect my seafood culinary skills. Fortunately the dish was well received by our friends (Marc had a "special" dish for him). Made some strawberry bellinis for the 1st time, which seemed appropriate given that it finally seems as though summer has arrived in Seattle. Our guests had us chuckling throughout the evening. It was a great way to end a fun day, especially with the Yanks winning again and the USA playing to a draw against the English in the World Cup.
Let's just hope it's not TOO WARM on the morning of June 26th – the day of the Seattle RnR. And now the taper begins.