Great Sunday-morning run

And may I just say that I was very, very glad not to be doing the Scotland 10K? There were bagpipes, there were runners with Scottish flags painted on their cheeks, I felt approval (I am half Scottish!) but also great relief that I was not going to run a very hard race (a hilly 10K like that is pretty brutal) in horrible crowds of people that would give me fits of misanthropy!

Ran over to meet S. at Runners Grove, then we did almost the whole loop (stopped a little early to avoid crowds at start--they were just about to go off as we were finishing up). I did the whole run rather harder than I imagined--I was five minutes late leaving the house, left only 30 instead of 35 minutes to get over, so I was feeling a little more time pressure than is really enjoyable. And then S. is naturally a considerably faster runner than I am, as I often have cause to observe! Really our paces would match better if I combined my tempo run with some piece of his long run, only I am doing longer training than he is, so I really was working hard!

(This is good. I want to pick up a bit of speed again for the Brooklyn half and for summer running, and it just won't happen if I keep doing most of my runs by myself at comfortable paces. I'm doing relatively low mileage, and that will continue because of triathlon obligations, so I really need to bump up the speeds on a couple runs each week if I am going to make my goals.)

First leg (116th St. to Tavern on the Green): 3.06 miles, avg pace 10:10, avg HR 156, max HR 169

Main circuit: 5.75 miles, avg pace 8:57, avg HR 162 (that is pretty close to half-marathon race pace), max HR 176

Call it 9 miles--that's very decent, I think. It is pretty freezing here, I am actually going to do my long bike ride later on inside, and just make sure that I get outside on the bike even if only for half an hour of easy tooling around every day this week...