I'm hot, hot, hot!!!

Time: 6:00pm
Location: Rogue Equipment
Weather: Nice and cool, I think summer is finally over!
People: Mandi, Tim, Dee, Clemmie, Peter, and some other girl.
Workout: 2 mile warm up, 4 at tempo (HMGP - 8:20), 2 mile cool down
Comments: What an awesome day! Work couldn't have gone any better. I have been working on a few pieces of new business and I got 3 of my quotes in early today!!! I'd probably need to do more explaining on how this all works, but long story short, it made for an excellent day :) Also, my HR boss wanted to talk to me at the end of the day and she let me know that I can start working my old hours. Not the same exact hours, but close. Before we all transferred, I used to work 7:30am to 4pm. This was awesome, traffic was still bad, but the extra hour to get a workout started made a world of difference. Especially now when it's getting darker soon. When we moved over, since I'm the single (meaning not married) with no kids, I got volunteered to do the 8:30 to 5pm shift. Ugh. That one hour in the morning eats up about 30 extra minutes of drive time. It was ok, but I really missed getting off early, especially when everyone around me had the earlier shift. So I'm back to getting off at 4:30. Woo hoo!!!

Met Ruth and group down south, ahhhh, 2 second drive from work, I'm really enjoying that. We start off and I made friends with Peter. Super nice guy and we have tons to talk about, as most marathoners do. We talk about our firsts, our PR's, our future goals etc. He really doesn't have a set goal yet. He was aiming for 3:45 with his wife for Houston, but his wife backed out, so he hasn't figured out if he wants to "race" it and try and PR, or just have fun. We got to the Congress bridge and we were off. 8:20 pace, holy crap. My Garmin was jumping all over the place. At some points it was showing 7:47, then it'd jump to 9:34's, so I just followed Peter. The pace felt forced, but I wasn't struggling as bad as I thought. I looked at our average pace, and that was a better indicator. Our first mile was 8:22, not too bad! Our second mile we stayed around the same and as we hit the 2 mile mark our pace had dropped to 8:24. I made the mistake of telling Peter on the turnaround that we slowed, but I didn't tell him it was just by 2 seconds so he picked it up. Thankfully I had the Garmin and knew he was running too fast so I stayed back. We definately picked up the pace and I'm proud to report that I averaged for 4 miles... dum dum da dum.... drum roll, please....

8:19's!!!

Woo hoo. What I learned was, ouch. I think I can pull off this pace for longer, like say a 10k, but going faster than that, like 23 seconds per mile faster to get me to my 10k pace might be a long shot. But I also have to remember we were running and dodging people on the trail, so I'm backing my expectations down for IBM. I'll be happy if I can run low 8:00's and if the moon and the stars align, maybe I'll have enough gas in the end to pick it up and make up some time.

IBM here I come!!