A recovery run turns speedy

I had a tough day on Friday that included lab tests from my annual checkup. As the day went on I realized that I was too worn out to do my daily run. After getting a decent night's sleep I woke up early and considered my running options: long or short, street or trail, near or far. I've wanted to run at Caumsett State Park in Lloyd Neck which is drivable in less than 15 minutes (and probably much less at 6:00 AM on a Saturday) and thought today might be the day. On further thought, with yesterday's blood tests, I was concerned about pushing too hard while running alone so I decided to stay local and just run in the neighborhood.

My thought was to run at whatever pace felt okay because I wanted to cover at least four miles. I wasn't interested in any hill training this morning so I set a course through my main neighborhood with the thought that I'd do some loops close to home and expand my distance based upon how I felt. I did a five minute elliptical session prior to the run to gauge my energy level and I think that served as a nice warm-up to my workout. For a change of pace I took along my iPhone and ran MotionX to capture the route via GPS. I started by trying AllSport GPS but I couldn't acquire a signal so I switched apps. The MotionX did an okay job but, as usual, it was off because it cut corners. My Garmin said I covered 4.4 miles at 9:00/mile and I Gmapped the run and that said the route was actually 4.53 miles for a pace of 8:46. That's more like it. I liked the feel of the run and I felt that I could have gone a bit harder if I needed to. Perhaps the energy of the race will allow me to pick up 15 seconds per mile next Saturday for a new PR.