Fun Run Thursday

I decided to throw a curveball in my training today.  Usually Thursday's are tempo runs, but Tuesday's run and yesterday's run turned into impromptu tempo runs with Emily, so today I decided I wanted a simple fun run.  No pacing, no thinking about speed.  With two tempo runs under my belt this week, I didn't feel bad about skipping tonight's group workout.  And I wanted to get my run in while it still looked like this outside:

Is it really February?!  Gorgeous!

Not only was the sun out, but it was also almost 40 degrees - pretty much a heat wave if you ask me.  I was really pumped to bust out my capris and pretend like it was April.

Thumbs up for warm weather

I had anticipated doing 4 miles today but felt pretty awesome the whole run so did a mile cool down and ended at just over 5.  Since I threw Tempo Thursday out the window and was running for fun I didn't care about my pace and rarely looked at my watch.  The few times I did, I was pleasantly surprised to see that it stuck right around 12 minutes.  I guess any pace seemed easy today compared the the 11 minute miles I've been running the past two days!

Graduating to the 12 minute mile club?

It was probably one of my favorite runs that I've done.  I felt awesome the entire time both mentally and physically and the route I ran was great.  Well, minus the part where the road turned into an off-ramp for the expressway and I had to play chicken through four lanes of traffic in order to avoid being a pedestrian on 490.  Either mapmyrun.com failed me, or I'm just really bad at following my own route instructions.  But hey, I got a few adrenaline-filled seconds of speed work in today.

I'm feeling UHmay-zing after today's fun run, but not gonna lie... after three days on I'm really excited for my day off tomorrow.  Lean cuisine pizza, diet coke, a gossip mag and my beloved stick roller... it's about to be a great night tomorrow.

Happy Friday!