Notes
2 mile warm-up with Emma before she raced Brian Kraft!
We ran most of the 2 together until I happily let her do her pick-ups solo, and then joined her again for the last little bit. So fun to run together as always.
It was QUITE hot! Even though it was only 7:45am.
2 mile cool-down with Emma, Jayne, Anders, Nick Ross and Marit Sonnesyn.
Emma ran with us for a bit to finish up a solid day and then turned back to enjoy the cool lake once again. Well deserved!
The rest of us continued around Lake Nokomis at a pretty solid clip. Nick and Marit eventually joined a different group as well, and Jayne and Anders and I cruised. If felt really good to cruise for a bit and my legs felt awesome.
We finished the lake loop and Anders had 5 more miles to go for the day. I really wanted to go with him and make it 9 and call it a long day, but I decided I probably shouldn't do 6 and 9 back to back just yet. In that moment I was frustrated by the fact that it still feels like to be responsible in my training I can't yet simply go by what feels good, I have to be overly cautious. On any other day I would have extended this to a long run just because I felt awesome, and those are the best kind of days. (In hindsight, this frustrates me even more because my long run the next day ended up being so utterly awful)
But oh well, I'm hopeful that those days of spontaneous long (or just 8-9 mile) days will come again soon.
It was really fun to be in the race atmosphere again, and to watch Emma and others race, and dream about racing to come. I would also say that my last 2 miles of the day, the ones when I was cruising with Anders and Jayne, were the miles in which I thought about injury or was worried about my knee the least. I don't think I really thought about it. And just that alone made the run glorious, even if it wasn't as long as I would have liked.