Today was one of those mythical top 10 days for running outside, partly cloudy, low ’60s, humidity in the mid 50s and a nice breeze from the WSW. It felt good to run in short/t-shirt and I even needed the hat to keep the sweat out of my eyes. Yes, I most definitely sweated this morning.

I wanted to get up to 30 miles for the week and needed 7.0 since I decided to take the day off yesterday to let the left shin feel a bit better. I wanted something under a 9:00 minute pace, but was going to let the leg decided how far and fast I would actually go.

• 1.0 – 8:57 / Easy to start and slowly picked up the pace as I warmed up.
• 2.0 – 8:44 / No issues with the leg by mile 2.0, so I decided to keep going. Although I did have to jump into the woods just before the 2.0 mile marker.
• 3.0 – 9:00 / Just running comfortably on this deceptive uphill section
• 4.0 – 8:34 / After I could see the turn-around at Goodhue I did pick up the pace a little and then ran comfortably downhill
• 5.0 – 8:09 / I always pick up the pace a bit on this section, it is a deceptive downhill and and I let myself go a little faster just to remind the old body it still can go a little faster if I want to. I might have even pushed the last .25 of this mile up to 85-90% of my 5K race effort level. It felt pretty good, but there is no way I could maintain that pace for a full 5K right now. Gotta do the work, but without any race on the horizon, it is smarter to just keep rolling along, get that base in and checking things out for a short distance every once in a while.
• 6.0 – 8:54 / Back to running an easy effort, but as soon as I could see the dirt road, I knew that I was going to have to find some trees again pretty quickly. The old body must be dredging pretty hard this weekend.
• 7.0 – 9:09 / Easy running up the hill and then on to the finish.

I was pretty surprised at how good I felt during the run and I think using the little toe separator helped with my right foot feeling a lot better. Not perfect, but definitely better. Thankfully, the left leg felt pretty good and didn’t bother, so I don’t know what was going on with that, but I also haven’t let Bennie put his head on that leg since yesterday afternoon and it seems to have made a bit of a difference. Sometimes it is the small things that make big differences

• Distance: 7.0 miles
• Time: 1:01:28
• Pace: 8:46
• Shoes: Skechers Razor 3

The Razor 3s did quite good today, but when I was looking at the amount of wear on the bottom, it is more than I usually see on my shoes at almost 50 miles. I don’t see them last me much more than 200 miles and I have a feeling that it has a lot to do with my running so much on dirt roads. It seems to be grinding them down pretty quickly.

A great day and another good run in the books.