Start time: 07/13/06, 7:00pm
Location: Old Town Alexandria and the Mount Vernon Trail
Distance: 5 miles
Average pace: 9:24min/mile . . . sort of

When I got ready to leave my apartment today to (finally) try out the Old Town Alexandria location of Pacers’s group runs, I thought to myself, “It seems kind of nice outside. I won’t dig out the sleeveless shirt.” And then I also left the half-frozen bottle of water, thinking that yeah, it wasn’t that hot… right?

Ooooof. What was I thinking? Super hot, super humid. On the bright side, I kept a pretty good pace going with Chris. Technically I didn’t really get that pace; Chris, two other runners, and I stopped at the halfway point to refill our water bottles for about two minutes, and on the way back we missed two lights and were stuck for another three and a half minutes. So to be fair, those rest stops helped out a lot. And if I add back in all that time elapsed it’s really a 10:30min/mile pace. But it felt good to look at the little chart I downloaded off the Garmin and know that once I took out those points, I actually did a good job of maintaining a steady pace. Yay!

Looking quite forward to Sunday morning!