Another week, another race.

Typically, I don’t like doing races during my marathon training. It can be really hard to add all those extra miles in an efficient manner but the Fitness Magazine 4 Mile race is one of my favorites. The men and women have separate start times and I have to admit I enjoy some of the all female races.

My Higdon plan had 16 miles on tap for the day and the tricky part for me was figuring out how to add the miles on to this. With the race starting at 9:00 am I wasn’t thrilled with adding the remaining 12 miles at the end. That always seems a little too daunting. So I decided to run at least four miles before the race and then add the remaining seven or eight miles at the end.

I got to Central Park around 7:30 in the morning and headed to the reservoir some flat easy miles and I figured running back towards the start of the race would give me close to five miles. I planned it perfectly, by the time I met up with my pal Lori my Garmin had a lovely five miles staring back at me.

Lori and I kept an good pace as I was showing her how I do my run/walk intervals and she kept my mind of all these extra miles I still had to plan and then after we met up with her friend Kristal who was also crazy enough to join us.

We headed back up the reservoir, again for easy flat miles. Lori was only planning to do one or two extra miles because she’s coming off an injury and slowly building up her mileage for the Staten Island Half Marathon in October. This left Kristal as my lone running mate. She normally runs around a 10 minutes mile so I was worried about keeping up with her. She even told me that if she was going too slow I could go on ahead. Funny. But what did happen is that I did run a little faster than I normally would have and felt good doing it. I only had to add 5.5 half miles by the time we got to the reservoir and let me tell you those miles flew by thanks to the great company.

Kristal, coming back from her own injury, left me with two miles to go on my own. I tried to maintain the pace that she had me at and was able to do that easily for the next mile. The last mile was harder but I just kept focusing on my intervals. Just get through each run interval and recover for that one minute. It was hard, but I did it.

I was happily covered with a good portion of dirt from the reservoir and even more happy that iPad successfully completed my plan for getting these 16 miles completed. I found a good tree to stretch, hit up the Gatorade man and made my way back to Westchester. My legs felt pretty good afterwards and the same thing this morning. Well done for a long run.

According to my plan, this upcoming week is supposed to be a down week mileage wise but since the NYRR 18 Mile Tune-Up is next week so I’m reversing my step down week with the 18 miles. This 18 mile, timed run will give me a good idea about where I am with my training. I’m a little nervous about doing all those loops in Central Park and being a slower runner by the time my third loop gets going I have to deal with tourists, pedi cabs, and other obstacles getting in my way. It can be lonely but this is a good event to see where I’m at.