Today was my last long run before the FIRM. The next time I run 13 miles will be on race day! I met up with Kevan this morning to run the actual course of the race. I wanted to see how the hills were if any, where they were, and just get a feel for the course so I know how to pace it on race day. We both decided we wanted to take the pace easy today and that we would do the run no faster than nine minute miles. Ideally 9'30's. We can both do that distance running 7'30's so running it on fairly fresh legs its hard to slow down to 9's. But we forced ourselves and thanks to our Garmins we kept true to that pace. I had my Garmin set with the course route in it so we could just follow that and Kevan kept an eye on our pace. I was actually the worse pace offender today but Kevan was good at slowing me down anytime I'd absent mindedly pick it up. In the end we ran the whole course at an 8:56/mile average. So we stayed right on target pretty much.
I'm happy to say the course looks fairly easy with a few exceptions to easy. There are some very small hills and inclines on the course. On a day when all I was doing was running a 13 mile race on the course I wouldn't really pay them much attention. However after swimming 1.2 miles and biking 56 some of them will prove to be challenging depending on how I'm feeling at the moment. There were two that stuck out in my mind. Both of these hills are after mile 9 or 10 which is right when my legs will be screaming for mercy. One of them is short and steep and the one I think will be really interesting to charge up is at mile 12. In fact that last mile is going to be a good challenge. Theres the hill heading back to the beach (again, not a big one, but after all that racing it will come into play) and then once you get to the beach you have to race the last 1/3 of a mile or so on the sand! Thats not going to be easy either!
I'm glad I checked out the course today. I've been meaning to for weeks but for one reason or another I've always had a reason to run somwhere else. Mostly to do my long run with some company, but in one instance it was pouring cats and dogs and I just didn't feel like running in that kind of heavy heavy rain. I feel like I now have a really good handle on the course. I've swam it twice, biked it 4 times, and ran it once. Which is more than enough. Tomorrow I'll swim it again, bike it again, and then do a quick three mile run with some race pace intervals in it. Its likely I'll swim it again on Wednesday too. But thats it for course workouts coming up.
So after our run today Kevan and I decided we needed to be sure and carefully recover. So we started by heading to the beach for a bit to soak our legs in the cool ocean, and then layed around there for a bit and capped it off with a couple of drinks and some lunch on the rooftop deck of the coast guard house. Now thats the way to end a workout! Great day!
Next up tomorrow....
One last S/B/R brick on the course!
No comments:
Post a Comment