Pineland - one week to go

Lots of unknown runners this morning at Pineland so I'm not going to even begin to list who's who. My goal for the morning was to (1) run only the first 8+ miles and (2) run at estimated race HR on two 1-mile sections of this. The goal being to figure out what my race pace is on this course. For my race HR, I'm using the HR splits that I had during the Maine 1/2 marathon in 2005 - one of my only two 1/2 marathons (the other was the White Mountain Miler two weeks later and I didn't wear my HR monitor for that). The 1/2 marathon HR started at 160 and rose to about 163 (mile splits). My two race-pace miles are in yellow (picture above) although I kept the race pace for about 1.3 miles on the 2nd one because I wanted to see how my HR fared on the long climb up. During my first race-pace segment, I passed the pack but James joined me and we ran the rest of the way together. He kept me moving faster than I had planned in the interval between the race-pace miles but still within a reasonable HR range. He also was itchin' to push the 2nd race pace segment, and especially that last 1/3 mile hill even harder so he's got some pent up energy in there. He's going to be a monster in the 50M.

After the run, Cacky and my parents joined me and we went for a nice walk on the River loop and then had lunch in the market. Lots and lots of other runners were around including Jill from Muddy Moose. Also fun to see local ski star Adele Espy out doing some nordic pole running with her coach, Dick Taylor. Adele is deferring college (I think Dartmouth) to go out to Sun Valley ID later this summer/fall/winter to train and try to make the olympic team (Yes the winter olympics are almost here!).