Week NINE!

After all the shifting and back to back to back run days last week, it feels good to be back on schedule this week!  Coming off of Sunday's ridiculously un-fun run, I was looking forward to balancing out my zen today with a good run.

I mapped out a nice five mile route that accidentally started with me and Emily having to scale a fence.  My apartment complex has a back/service entrance that leads to another street that we usually run on.  Since we ALWAYS start from the same point, I thought I'd switch it up and have us start out the back entrance.  Well, there's a huge gate there and the handful of other times I've went out that way, I've been able to rig the gate and run through.  Apparently they fixed the gate to be un-riggable so rather than walk the .25 miles to the main entrance, we decided to climb the fence.  Why not.

Anyways, we were running with the sun at our backs as it was setting and we could see our shadows in front of us.  I understand the concept of a shadow, but man, my shadow totally does NOT look as good running as my person does.  That's what I'm telling myself at least.  Basically, this sums things up perfectly:

yup.

Even though I battled with my shadow to make it look like it had more running finesse, I completely enjoyed all five miles of today's run.  It was perfect weather and we settled into a comfortable pace and I felt great. 

It's funny because our average pace was 11:59 and I felt really good and comfortable the whole time.  Even with the last mile-long incline I still managed to keep a good pace.  I still surprise myself every time I'm able to keep an average pace like that on any run over 3 miles.  I think I'm earning my stay in the 12 minute mile club :)

is my arm getting tan?!

BIG things are coming up this weekend and next -- my first double digit long run and my first 15k race.  I'm nervously excited for both!  I'm antsy to plow through this week and get to Saturday.  And then next Sunday.  And then 3 weeks after that 13.1!  Time is FLYING!!!