Another long run

Sunday morning, the alarm goes off way too early, especially after a late night watching Olympics. My goal is to be out and running at 6:30, but things move slowly and it's 6:45 before I'm parked and out of my car at Barton Springs. Jim said he'd meet me starting at 7, so I only have a little bit of time for a short out-and-back on the greenbelt before catching up with him. I've given up on wearing sunglasses during these early morning runs. By the time the sun comes up and I need them, they're too dripping with sweat to be of any use. I grab my water bottle and a couple of GUs and we hit the road.

Jim is only in for 70 minutes or so today. Note that when Jim says "70 minutes" he means exactly 70 minutes of _running_ and doesn't count any of that other time. I'm a lot more, uh, flexible in how I count my time, either just looking at my watch when we start ("well, we started at eight and now it says 9:30, so that's an hour and a half") or actually starting the stopwatch when we hit the road, but not stopping it every time we stop for water.

So we head out of Zilker and run the I35 loop on the hike and bike trail. It's not a bad morning, but as usual, the humidity starts to overwhelm you after a while. My legs are feeling tired today; I ran a 4 mile recovery run yesterday and I don't feel like it recovered me too much. I guess that the training mileage is starting to wear on me.

The loop is fine, the sun comes up, I sweat a lot and eat a GU somewhere along the way. Unfortunately, without Dave or Scott, we have no excuse to stop at all of the water fountains along the way since Jim and I each carry our own water. I realize how much my run around the lake is broken up into fountain-to-fountain segments, and it hurts (mentally anyway) when I have to keep running past one of those fountains. But still, it's only about an hour and fifteen minutes and we're cruising back into Zilker. Jim, of course, has kept track of his real running time and delcares that he needs another ten to fifteen minutes. I know that, under whatever circumstances, I really need about another 40 minutes or so, so we head out on the greenbelt.

Now my legs are tired and I'm ready to stop, but I will say that time on the greenbelt goes by much faster than on the road or even the hike and bike. Jim turns around after 10 minutes or so, I keep going aiming to go out 25 minutes. It's funny how the "back" part always seems to happen faster than the out, so I've learned if I really care about the time to add an extra five minutes on the out side. Anyway, it's really nice on the trail and I can mostly forget about how hard it is to run this last half hour. I pass a few people with their dogs and some mountain bikers blow past me, but mostly it's just quiet and beautiful out here.

Finally I turn back at 25 minutes and make it back to the parking lot. As I arrive, I meet a woman who looks sort of lost. She's at the start of the greenbelt and asks me how to get back to downtown Austin. Good thing she didn't keep going on this way! I explain to her how to get back over Barton creek and then on towards downtown. She's from Lebanon, and is here to get her daughter started at UT. It's definitely a good introduction to Austin for an outsider...

Ok, so week nine of Chicago training is now in the books. The bounce that was in my step a few weeks back is now officially gone. I totaled something like 33 miles this last week, and I'm starting to feel more work out in the lower body with each week. I just have to keep going, stay healthy and take advantage of the rest weeks when they come up. Hopefully all of this training will pay off when I start to taper and I'll get the freshness back in my legs in the last few weeks leading up to the race.