Tougher twenty
This weekend we were due for another tour of the Austin Marathon course. I was a little off this time, though. The weather changed a lot over the last couple days, and I woke up feeling pretty congested. Then, when I started running, my legs felt pretty stiff, too, but I don’t know what that was from. In any case, I ran with my usual group for the first several miles of the course. It gets easier after the first couple miles, and that helped my legs loosen up. I could tell I was working too hard to make it to twenty like that, though, so when the others picked up the pace on Lake Austin Blvd I just let them go.
I felt a lot like cutting the route short, but I knew I needed to turn this into a mental toughness run. I ran by myself the rest of the way. The route we did cut across the middle of the marathon course. From 35th Street, we veered on to 38th and took that over to Avenue H before heading north to pick up the course again. I hadn’t run through that section of town before. Somewhere on 38th I had to stop for a brief coughing fit, but I felt much better after that.
Once I finished the loop up to 49th and got back to Duval I started to see people from the group again who had run shorter distances and were taking the same route home. I picked up the pace over the last few miles and had a pretty strong finish. I was actually catching the group I had lost earlier in the day. I attempted to do some strides at Auditorium Shores, but I was pretty tight and they weren’t very good. I stuck around for the stretching routine, and that was that. I’m glad I got the distance in. It was just about 20 miles. My heart rate was a little higher than I wanted, but it’ll do.