Tuesday night workout

This week is monster week #1. We have our biggest marathon workouts coming up in the next few weeks, and Tuesday night was the start. The workout was on the trail - warmup 2 miles, water, 3 miles MGP (marathon goal pace), easy half mile to water, 3 miles MGP again, cooldown 1.5 miles. My MGP is 8:00, so with the 100 degree afternoon, I was hoping to be able to hold on.

Can I tell you that my legs were tired? I would have easily used it as an excuse, but I am trying to be tough these days. My times for the first 3 MGP miles were - 8:00, 8:00, 7:56. We were not supposed to be breathing hard at that point, but with 100 degrees, we were panting like dogs when we stopped for water. The second 3 MGP miles were supposed to be the hardest part of the workout, but I tried to maintain pace. Apparently I was feeling really good, because I went 7:53 (oops!), 7:59, 7:54.

The bad part about the workout was that we still were 1.5 miles away from our cars when we had to cool down. I was getting abdominal cramps pretty bad because I had eaten granola all morning and had to poop. It was all I could do to run/walk the 1.5 miles without pooping myself. Of course when we finished, I didn't have to poop at all. You know you like poop talk.

Oh, and I definitely think running MGP miles on the trail is harder than running them on the road. It always feels so good to hit the bridge and have that nice stretch of hard sidewalk to bound across. The trail is so much slower. Hopefully that means that I will feel much faster come marathon day.