Mount Bonnell!!!

This morning, Gilbert prescribed a 14 miler, starting at RunTex downtown, rolling through the hilly Scenic loop, and then up Mount Bonnell, to a turnaround, and back to RunTex via Exposition, with more rolling hills, and finally the last few miles on the trail again. I was excited about this run for quite a while, and nervous, of course.

Anyway, today dawned really nicely, with clear skies, lower humidity than lately, and a fairly crisp 67 degrees. Good enough. We met at 6:00, and my partner Diana was there, so thankfully, I didn't have to do this alone. The faster people headed out in a flash, and we trailed behind. Now, we're not slow, but we certainly aren't ready to run the long runs with those other folks quite yet. we started out at around 10:00 pace for a couple of miles on the trail, as we carefully ran in the pre-dawn darkness on the slightly uneven surfaces there. Once we hit the streets on the other side, we picked up the pace a bit. Our first stop was at the boat docks, for a quick drink of water. That was 4 miles, and our pace was just under 10:00/mile, which is probably our ideal training pace for long runs.

After that stop, we rolled into and through the challenging Scenic loop, a local favorite course. I was feeling pretty good, and we cruised there in good fashion. We got to 35th Street, after passing several other training groups along the way, and stopped next at Mayfield park for another quick drink of water. This was about 6.2 miles, and our average pace was still right on track, about 9:56/mile. We turned up Mt. Bonnell Road, and powered up the two-tiered hill. I was a little uncertain about how long the mountain was, and how steep, so I carefully pushed up the slopes. Diana fell back a bit, but we stayed together pretty much. Reaching the top, I was surprised at how good I felt. We stopped for Gilbert's Powerade, and then went down to the turnaround, and returned to the Powerade for a quick fillup. Then, we rolled down Bonnell, retracing our steps to 35th Street. The couple of miles up and over Bonnell were at 10:05 pace, and then we had a quick 9:00 mile coming down the mountain. We were now at 8.6 miles, and our average pace had dropped to 9:51/mile.

Up 35th to Exposition, and now we endured the rolling terrain down Exposition, all the way to the next Powerade stop at O. Henry Middle School. We actually picked it up a bit coming down Exposition, and we were now at 10.7 miles and 9:48 overall pace.

At that point, Gilbert has always told us to pick it up on the way back, for the last 3 - 4 miles of a long run, so we took advantage of the slightly downhill aspect getting back to the trail, and then really picked it up on the trail, passing folks left and right, and we powered to the finish with miles in the 8:30 range, for a final run total of 13.9 miles and an average pace of 9:30/mile. Really surprising overall pace, and it was really cool to have that much left at the end of the run, that we could push that hard.

A handful of 100m strides on the grass finished off the run, and then we met Gilbert for the usual Sunday stretching routine, for about an hour. My legs feel just fine, no aches, no pains, but I'm sure I'll be sleepy this afternoon.

A great day at the running office.