Back At It

After Sunday's race I spent some time in the hot tub and recovering with the family up in Beaver Creek. Sunday I got in a lite 5 mile morning run in Beaver Creek followed by an evening run back in Denver of 3.5 miles. Felt good and wasn't even sore from the previous day. Tuesday was another easy day (6 miles) and today I got back into it with a fairly tough workout tonight on the rolling hills of the Highline Canal path.
I'm getting used to doing all of these long, hard workouts on my own and think that it is probably going to be a benefit if the San Antonio course turns out to be as lonely/desolate as I've heard it can be in the back half of the race. Anyway, tonight's workout was 2mi warmup, 8 x 1mile at T-pace (5:50*) on 30 seconds rest, 2mi warm down. I was a bit anxious heading to the workout on the warmup because I really didn't know how the legs would respond, but it went pretty well. My splits were:
Mile 1: 5:54                                 Mile 5: 5:50
Mile 2: 5:52                                 Mile 6: 5:48
Mile 3: 5:50                                 Mile 7: 5:53
Mile 4: 5:46                                 Mile 8: 5:59
                        Avg pace = 5:51
Fell off a little bit at the end there, but tonight I think it mainly was because I was just so looking forward to it being done.
** Now, I should mention that after the weekend's race and kind-of the confirmation that I am in better shape now, I have decided to bump my training paces up one more VDOT level for the last 4 week push of my training. For the first month of my training I had started at a VDOT level of 59 in order to be conservative and try to account for the fact that I am training at 5,280+ foot elevation. After about 4-5 weeks I bumped the level to 60 and I have been training there for the past 5 weeks. Now I am going to bump it again, so these will be my new paces:
E pace: 7:16                   I pace: 400m: 1:20                      R pace: 200m:  :36
M pace: 6:09                               1,000m: 3:20                                 400m: 1:14
T pace: 5:50                                1,200m: 4:00                                 800m: 2:28

If I were training at Sea Level, I would be training at a VDOT of 64 given my current fitness, making tempo pace 5:36/mile, etc. But I could never hang with that up here. So... that's why you'll see me striving for different numbers now in workouts as I edge closer to race day, just 32 days from now.

Lastly, I nabbed some of this weekends race photo's off of Brightroom... Here are a couple:

HAPPY TRAINING!