10 miles

It was supposed to be 12. But I feel like I need to give my shins a rest (OK, only the right one, but tell me how to rest one and not the other....) and besides that, Hub needs to get to Texas Stadium for some festival thingy for his work, so I had to be back by quarter after 7:00. Besides the shins, which did let up after they warmed up, the rest of the run was great. It's back to normal temperatures around here, which is about four degrees too hot, but the humidity wasn't too terrible, and the rest of me felt great. Pacing was a little crazy, though, which I'm a little concerned with -- splits were not even at all, and they usually are all within a few seconds of each other. Maybe there were a lot of hills. Maybe I'm just uneven.

anyhoo, I'm not too worried about the shins since I've known I need new shoes, and I did just pump up the mileage significantly in the last two weeks. And because of the shuffling of the schedule last weekend, I ended up running six days straight. Normally, the schedule calls for a day off after the long run, and a day between the weekday runs and the weekend. Ya, if I followed the schedule, I might not have these problems. Sheesh, I can be such an ijit sometimes. But I did spend a lot of time online last night comparing symptoms and pain and such to be sure I don't have compartment sydrome (doesn't that sound scary?) or heaven forfend a stress fracture. I was irritated that it was bugging me at the start of the run, and even considered bagging it altogether, but then made a deal that I'd see how it felt after 4 miles. By the end of 3, it was fine. Helped also that I tried a trick I read on CoolRunning.com about walking on my heels during walk breaks (the poster suggested doing it for 100 yds before starting the run, but as usual, I took sound advice and twisted it to meet my needs...). That seemed to bring a lot of relief.

So, here's the splits, more for posterity's sake than anything else. The last mile is partial because when you add in the walk breaks, I really did cover 10 total miles; total time, including walk breaks was 1:52:02.

Mile 1 -- 11:05
Mile 2 -- 11:03
Mile 3 -- 11:18 (shin shut up right about the end of this mile)
Mile 4 -- 10:47
Mile 5 -- 10:52
Mile 6 -- 10:33 (this was downhill through the park --Wheeeee!)
Mile 7 -- 10:45
Mile 8 -- 11:01
Mile 9 -- 10:49
Mile .44 -- 4:46 (10:53 pace)