Tempo Thursday, August 17

Another early morning, was up and out the door at 5:35, so I was finished by goal time of 6:45, although it still would be good to get up earlier, even with this so called change to my hours, I still want to keep going at the same time so eventually I can hopefully talk some sense into someone and get my regular hours back, not to mention a HUGE part of why I like to come in then is traffic before 7:20 is not bad, after 7:20 it adds another 10 minutes or so to my commute and granted, my commute is only about 15 minutes anyway, but I intentionally have that where I live near work cause I don’t like to drive in stop and go!!

Got up and heard that it might be raining, not a big deal but it has been cooler, went out to set the GPS to get a signal and it wasn’t raining but was cool again, but not as cool as Tuesday so I was comfortable in the shorts and coolmax t-shirt. Set out for an easy warm up and wanted to do a tempo run of 8 miles, 6 at tempo pace, and the pace I had in mind for today was 8:00, I didn’t quite get that, but I was fairly close and that’s OK. I still have time to build up and the speed will get there, I’m doing two things on these tempos as I’m trying to keep a higher speed but I’m also running it over some pretty decent hills, sure I could take the tempo to a flat area, but that’s not going to help me at MCM, so I go hills and make myself work. As long as I’m keeping under MP, and keep getting faster, I’ll feel OK. I ended up adding some interesting loops to my regular run just to get the mileage in too. Anyway, these are the splits:

Mile 1: 8:48 (warm up a bit faster than I usually plan)
Mile 2: 7:11 (there is no way this was this fast, I lost signal a couple of times and I think it averaged into the next mile, so I figure both mile 2 and 3 are 8:00, this one was flat)
Mile 3: 9:02 (this was up and over a couple of good hills)
Mile 4: 8:17
Mile 5: 8:34 (big hill later in the run than last week and faster, even though I did wimp out and have to walk a tiny bit of it)
Mile 6: 8:01
Mile 7: 8:16
Mile 8: 8:31 (supposed to be cooling down)
Mile .25: 2:25 (a little more than the planned 8 cause I was still a bit from home)

Overall not bad and it did start sprinkling, then actually had a pretty good rain, was wishing I had my hat yet again…but the run was good. I like the rain as long as it’s not terribly cold out. I just checked my plan and found I had wanted to do the tempo part at 8:10 pace, looking at it, I was close to that, although I did do the 5 tempo miles last week at a better pace...need to work more on that!

Still upset about the work hours thing. I just wish it was in my boss’ hands as he’s laid back and cool about it and has been quite accommodating with me working part days and extra hours to make up time so I can leave early a few times when needed since I have limited vacation time left this year…He very much knows the help me and my co-worker are to the department and appreciates us, he even said he hoped this wasn’t something that was going to make us want to quit…sigh…problem is his boss and honestly, I’m not sure why she is having the problem as I get along with her and have always thought she was cool as well…I’m going to discuss it more in 2 weeks at my 6 month and see if this can’t be a temp thing, I mean I can understand them wanting me here later for the time being with the acquisition we just had, (we pretty much doubled our company and quadrupled our work load) my hope is they will let me get back to “normal” hours once things settle in a bit and we MAYBE add extra staff.

Anyway, busy day, busy week so best get back to it. I have soooo many things to do.