Long Run at Memorial Park

I've been growing tired of running hills lately. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against the hills here in Huntsville, but like anything in life, it is possible to have too much of a good thing.

I drove down to Memorial Park in Houston today for my long run. My original plan was to just go down to The Woodlands for my run, but I didn't want to run then entire route on concrete, so I decided to go down to Memorial Park in Houston. I've never been there before, but I've heard great things about the gravel running path so I decided to give it a shot. I met up with one of my former athletes (Allison) who still runs recreationally and we ran 4 loops (~11.6 miles) of Memorial Park. We started are extremely easy and probably averaged about 9:00/mile for the first loop. We picked it up a bit on the second loop and by the time we got to the third loop we were running pretty quick. I don't know our exact pace, but judging by my respiration rate and the effort I was putting in I'd guess we probably averaged 7:30 to 7:40 per mile from miles 6 through 10. We backed off a bit in the last 1.5-miles to finish in 1:37:12. It was a good run and it was nice to get off the hills for a bit. I also enjoyed catching up Allison. It was well worth the two hour round trip.

I went out and ran again in the evening; covering my 3.05-mile loop in 24:35. My mileage has been quite high for a while (530 miles in the past 10 weeks) and I can really feel it from time to time, but all-in-all it's going well. I need to be sure to not run my easy mileage runs too fast so that I can continue to have good quality workouts when they're scheduled.