Peak Week and the Return of the Lost GPS

For most of the past week, I've been living every gadget-loving runner's worst nightmare: I couldn't find my Garmin Forerunner 110 after Monday night's run. Several days of fruitless searching later, I knew there was one surefire way it would turn up.

After visiting a local retail outlet, I walked through the front door last night, announcing, "I'm sure looking forward to wearing this brand new Forerunner 410 on tomorrow's long run."

Within the hour, the 110 was spotted next to my bed.

With a smug look on my face, I returned my purchase today. I knew the whole time that the 410 was never leaving its box.

So the 110 and I reunited in time to take on the longest long run of this half marathon training season -- a 14-miler into the heart of George Bush Park and back again. I started with my pace group but needed to let them go at the first available restroom break. Morning coffee gets all kinds of body systems going....

At least dawn had broken over the forest by the time I found myself solo. I felt just a twinge of regret about deciding to return the newer Forerunner, as the 110 is a basic model that doesn't include an interval-training function. I was doing on-the-run arithmetic to figure out when to take the next walk break. I finished off the 14th mile right at the end of the 3rd hour.

Once again, weather played a part in pacing as it was singlet-warm today. Most likely it will be cooler on race day and I can knock off 13.1 miles in significantly less than three hours. The starting gun in downtown Houston booms in 28 days and 16 hours.

Finally, I feel that I must share this trailside message of motivation that I saw this morning from Katy Students Run:

Trafigura Home Run 10K

This post is actually being written two weeks overdue, but through the cheater's magic of Blogger pre-dating, I'm labeling it with the actual race date to avoid any future confusion if I come looking for it....

For the second time, I came downtown to take part in the Trafigura Home Run benefiting Ronald McDonald House Houston. The course route was reconfigured this year so that the start/finish and postrace party were located on Allen Parkway in the shadow of the Interstate 45. The bulk of the mileage was still out-and-back on Allen Parkway, but at the far end, the 10K runners would visit the Montrose/Allen Parkway intersection three times in a cloverleaf  pattern. (Look up USATF course TX12195ETM for a visual,)

As entertaining as I find the art of course layout, the more pressing concern was actually weather. Early December can still mean warm and humid conditions and I had to take care not to let myself get sucked out of the start at too fast of a pace. As I was missing out on our usual training group run back home in dam country, I decided to practice run/walk intervals even if this was "only" 10K, and the results were quite positive:

Mile 1 - 9:46
Mile 2 - 10:00
Mile 3 - 10:16
Mile 4 - 11:15
Mile 5 - 11:10
Mile 6 - 11:31
Last .27 - 2:37
Elapsed 10K time - 1:06:35 per Garmin Forerunner 110, 1:06:36 per race chip timing

My memory may be a bit fuzzy, but I don't think I've clocked under 1:10 in a 10K in quite a while. So with a new tree ornament around my neck, I went home happy.