Faster than a resting hummingbird

I'm happy to say that I've made it out of bed at 5 am the last 3 days for my scheduled workouts. Tomorrow will be 4 days in a row and the first time this training cycle that I have done all my weekday workouts according to plan!  I think I'm finally getting used to the new wakeup time, too, because I've been awake just before the alarm the last 2 days.  Yes, I'm abnormally happy about this.

Anywho, this morning I had 5 miles, 4 at race pace. I made the rather stupid decision to run just with Run Keeper (a great app with GPS and plays my playlists too), which is all fine and dandy except I didn't have anything to gauge my actual running pace with.  Every 5 minutes during the workout Run Keeper tells me (out loud, in a slightly annoyed woman's voice) my average pace over the whole run, and whether I'm ahead or behind target pace.  When the workout is over it gives you total miles, time, and mile splits, as well as a little GPS-driven map of your route.  Left to my own devices, I always run too fast. Which I did indeed do.

After a half mile warmup, I sped up to what I thought felt like an 8:45 mile pace.  Dunno what it was for the first half mile of race pace (avg. was 10:02 over the first mile including warmup), but race pace mile .5 to 1.5 (uphill! dragging Murphy!) was dead on at 8:44.  Mile 1.5 to 2.5 was 8:28, and mile 2.5 to 3.5 was 8:09 (uphill again, steaming past a totally shocked dude with earphones who hadn't heard me coming).  The last half mile at race pace was probably close to the right pace (whole mile was 9:41 but that includes half a mile of cool down).  So yeah, race pace miles were too fast again, and a great lesson to stick with my regular equipment and use the fun toys as extras.  And now I totally know that currently, I don't have a "fall into it" race pace to count on.  Thank goodness Portland has pace bunnies.

Today's Milepost:

Milepost 5.09, iPhone camera.  I know this appears to just be a picture of branches with leaves, but it's not.  As I was stretching on the front steps, I heard a small tweet from one of the Lollipop Trees, as we call them.  I thought it was one of the baby sparrows from the nest on the corner of our roof, so went over to take a look.  Instead, I saw a tiny hummingbird, just chilling on a branch.  If you look above the space between the "be" and "a," almost 2/3 of the way up, you can just see him after the blue sky and the two twigs in the sideways v-shape.  He just sat there and let me take all sorts of pictures of him.  Wish I'd had the big camera instead!

The Details:
Date: 7/29/2010
Departed: 5:25 am
Start temp: 55, cloudy and humid, with a headwind from the south again
Mileage: 5.09
Watch time: 45:59
Running time: 45:29 (about 30 seconds for dog pit stops and drop offs (he only went two miles today))
Average Heart Rate/Max Heart Rate: 170something (forgot to turn off my HRM when finished)/189
Average Pace: 8:56
Race Pace Miles:  8:44, 8:28, 8:09 and two half miles of unknown pace

Tomorrow morning is a nice aerobic 4-miler with Murph.  Tomorrow afternoon we leave for Hood River to celebrate our 6th Anniversary with some hiking, chilling, eating, and drinking.  And instead of running on Sunday, I'm splitting my long run up:  9ish miles into work on Monday, and then 8 miles home (with, I guess, either a mile cooldown walk or a mile bus ride).  Should be interesting!  Last time I ran home from work it was horrible.