Oof! What a day! I ran my first 25k today. Farthest distance I've ever been by 3km! I dreamt that I finished it and found it super easy...and then woke up to reality. Sadly, I never run as fast in reality as I do in my mind.
There were only 13 of us doing the 25k, so we mostly stuck together as a group on the way out. I passed the 10.5k mark where I usually turn around and falsely believed it "wasn't that much farther". The distance seems to stretch out sooo much farther when you don't know where you're going! It was along the river, so a nice pretty route that was flat except for the hills when we had to go over the bridges.
I made it out in 1h11min something (I was too exhausted to look closely). On the way back our group split into four natural groups...the faster, the fast, the back posse, and me. :P I just couldn't keep up to the others! So I set my legs to a "comfortably fast" pace and trekked those 12.5k back on my own. I actually passed the back posse as they were stopping for water breaks and I was too much in the zone to stop (and too fearful I wouldn't start again).
Total time: 2.29.37!!
A quick math calculation shows that this is justover 10k/hour, or justunder 6min/k split times. I am feeling fairly satisfied with myself. I had hoped to get a time under 2.30 and I did. The last 2k I couldn't quite keep up my rhythm, so I fell into the mental mantra of "almost done, almost done." And total unstopped time was only about 5min slower than that, so clearly I didn't stop too much! Actually, I only stopped once on the way back when there was 2k to go, as I was desperately thirsty. My mistake, as that threw my rhythm. But then, I don't know how much faster I would've been if I hadn't had the water.
And now the reality is that my muscles are exhausted! As in, really, really exhausted!
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