Day 67C--14 Miles

14 MILES!!!! And with some post-run TLC, I'm ok. The run itself actually wasn't that bad. From mile 12-13 1/2 our group was chatting and energetic. We stopped talking the last 1/2 mile, but that was when we skipped our last walk interval and just ran to get the run over with. Thanks to a YouTube video, I was able to figure out how to get my lap splits for the run. I did miss one of the mile markers, so I had to take a two mile time and divide it by two for miles 7 and 8. That mile marker was the turn around sign. The path is a big confusing mess at that point because of the Navy Pier parking lots and entrances, so I was paying so much attention to staying on the right path that I forgot to mark the end of the mile. That and realizing we were halfway done with our run is always kind of exciting and distracting.

Here are my mile splits

10:48--mile 1
11:30--mile 2
14:24--mile 3
12:31--mile 4
13:36--mile 5
11:51--mile 6
11:55--mile 7
11:55--mile 8
11:20--mile 9
12:44--mile 10
12:31--mile 11
11:07--mile 12
11:03--mile 13
11:48--mile 14

This seems to happen on all of my training runs. We start fast, then get slow as we stop for the bathroom, lose some runners and get Gatorade and water at the various Fleet Feet stations on the path. We also are slower on the more crowded parts of the lakefront path. With all the passing and getting passed, it's hard to pace well. That's something that shouldn't be as hard on race day because keeping the group together won't be as much of a concern. We speed up at the end after we've passed the water stations and everyone has gone to the bathroom. I think knowing we're less than 30 minutes from being done also helps encourage us all to be a bit faster. We never talk about speeding up, but it seems to happen every run.