Tale of Two Long Runs: First Run Back Home

As I mentioned in my last post, my wife and I spent 10 days in Italy recently. My long run 10 days ago was in Italy, and it was kind of slow. My first real "back to normal life" moment once we got home on Saturday evening was my normal long run this past Monday morning. And it was a good one!

It was raining when I woke up, which was odd as my weather app was showing a weather system spinning around us with "rain possible after 11 am:"

But instead, it rained for the entirety of my 11 miles. It was harder after about a mile in, but then it started letting up and I thought my "pace miles" might be dry. But nope... it kept raining. Damn.

I might have been "running angry" at the rain. Sometimes when I'm annoyed, I run a bit harder. And maybe that was happening. But between the cooler weather, the rain (not a fan), and possibly running angry AT the rain, I was posting some good times! It was totally making up for my previous slower long run in Italy.

After a 2.5 mile warm-up, I ran 6 "pace" miles with half-mile splits that looked like this:

3:10, 3:08, 3:05, 3:11, 3:02, 3:06, 3:08, 3:04, 3:11, 3:10, 3:05, 3:07 = 37:32 (6:15.33/mile pace)

That's mile splits of 6:18, 6:16, 6:08, 6:12, 6:21, and 6:12.

(I don't know what happened in that slower 5th mile. I was happy I was able to speed it back up for the final mile.)

And then my cool down splits were much faster than my slow Italy run: I was cooling down at 8:21 pace last week, and I averaged 7:30 pace on my cool down this week (with bigger hills this week).

In Italy last week, my overall run was at 7:19 pace, and this week it was at 6:47 pace.

I got home and stripped my heavy wet clothes by the door:

Shoes were soaked too.

My shoes took 1.5 days to dry out and were just ready in time for my next run. :)