Gah… Second weekend in a row, faced with rain and cold. Fortunately, It wasn’t the downpour as last week, just some drizzle, but it was just as cold. This morning was the team’s longest run, going into Build 1 of our training cycle. It was also my longest since the Austin Marathon just a little over a month ago.
We met at the usual Ocean/San Vicente spot in Santa Monica. Pretty big turnout for a rainy run, but so awesome to see such participation. One of my teammates, Jessica, even had a plastic bag covering her body with the words, “Rain? IronTeam Don’t Give a Sh*t!”, in the nature of the bad ass Honeybadger videos. We started off with a warmup up San Vicente, then south on Ocean, and did a few out and backs up Amalfi and Troll bridge. If you don’t know what that means, it means a very flat first half, followed by a very hilly second half. I seem to perform better whenever there’s hills though because I like to take advantage of the downhill and let gravity take me down. This was the route.
I even thought to take this run very easy because we had a pretty tough bike ride yesterday, but I guess running with people faster than me helped push me. Sad to say that those fast ones were on their LA Marathon “recovery” pace, but nevertheless I was happy to take that opportunity. I mean, a teammate, Adam, completed the LA Marathon in under 3 hours, and here I was running the second half of 13.1 with him. We even had good conversation, catching up on things, then when we realized I could PR this distance (previous PR was 2:01 at the Huntington Beach Half), we pushed it even further! 1:59 – DONE.