Last night was my last workout before Sunday's Statuto Race on the Embarcadero, an 8K put on by the SF Italian Athletic Club going back nearly 100 years. (The first running was 1919, but there was one year during World War II that it wasn't run.) I have never run an 8K, but something small and cheap and right in town in the 5-10K range seemed like a nice summer racing kickoff. It's new distance for me but one I'm kind of excited about, and I can't deny feeling just a bit giddy to race again as I put this last workout away.
The workout was nothing fancy, just some mile repeats at race-ish pace. RunCoach is predicting a 35:06 / 7:03 pace finish for me, but I think I can do a little better than that. Originally, I'd planned to run this race as more of a workout than an all-out race, but after a pretty decent month of training, I decided, what the hell. Let's just race and see how my fitness is. My target race (Wharf to Wharf 6-miler) is still nearly two months out, so there's no risk of blowing that race, and nothing else between now and then that I care all that much about. Also if you're going to get a shiny new automatic PR, why not make it a good one, amirite?
8K is 4.97 miles, close to halfway between 5K & 10K, which is sort of interesting in terms of trying to come up with a goal time/pace. Back in December I ran a strong-for-me 5K at 6:51 pace, even though I had not been training that much or that seriously, but it's been a very, very long time since I ran a fair 10K course in good shape. (I ran Shamrock Shuffle 10K in March in 43:05, though I think we can all agree that that course was closer to 6 miles than 10K, so maybe ~7:10-11 pace.) I think it's going to be a bit of a guess no matter what, but since my training for the last month has been going well, I don't think it's unreasonable to shoot for 7:00 pace for five miles, which gives a nice round 35:00 total.
Tonight's workout was 4 mile repeats this time with 90 second jog recoveries, so I basically went into it viewing it as a sort of 8K race simulator (just 4.36 miles instead of 5--4 hard miles plus the recovery intervals). Since I'm shooting for 7:00 miles on Sunday so I tried to stay pretty comfortably in that wheelhouse, with interval times of 7:01, 7:01, 7:00, and 6:57. I think that's the fastest set of mile repeats I've ever done, so I just hope I didn't push it too hard & am able to recover well enough by Sunday!
I'm certainly not in mind-blowing shape, but if my Spreadsheets of Miles are to be believed, this month's 171 miles is the first time I've broken 150 miles in a month since July 2018 (151 miles) and *the* most I've run in a month since August 2017 (196.4)! (Now that is a sad thought, given that I ran Boston to Big Sur in April 2018. LEARN FROM MY MISTAKES!)
More crucially, MOST months in the last year have been less than 100 miles due mostly to work/personal travel and crazy work stress, which I was actually relieved to realize; it makes it a little less mystifying that I've had some days this month where I've felt absolutely exhausted after workouts that, on paper, didn't really seem all that tough. Part of me had been worried that I had some kind of health problem or that age was finally catching up with me, but realizing just how much of a difference there is mileage-wise between this month and what I've been routinely doing makes it a lot more likely that it's just been the miles piling up, in a good way, in a way that in my head feels totally normal but that my body hasn't actually had to deal with in actual reality for a good while. So, that realization is reassuring.
In any case, what I'm saying is, I've had a good month of training, and while a month isn't all that much, it's more than I've been able to string together in a while, so I'm excited to see what my body is able to do on Sunday. Statuto Race is a really tiny community race (capped at 250 runners total), so there's also a chance I could snag an award depending (as always) on what the day brings and who else shows up. (Last year the top three women ran 30:51, 32:29, and 35:34, and the 30-39 age group winners ran 30:51, 39:49, and 40:41, so there's a chance!)
So, yes. Just a couple more short, easy runs this week, and then we race. Fingers crossed for a good day!
Good Luck!! :)
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