In preparation for Sunday's Nike+ Human Race, I thought I'd go out tonight and give my planned 10k course a test drive. I've never raced a distance longer than 5k, so I wanted to try and see how I would feel keeping the pace around 8:15 - 8:30, which would be pretty close to my anticipated race pace.

It was around 75 degrees with low humidity by the time I started around 8:30pm. Surprisingly enough, my legs felt pretty fresh after yesterday's 9-miler. I was worried that my Achilles would start bothering me again, or my quads would feel dead, but overall everything felt really good!

I started out the first mile pretty conservatively just to get the legs warmed up but picked up the pace for miles 2 and 3 because that part of the route is fairly flat, and I knew I had a couple miles of hills (both up and down) coming up that could (WOULD) slow me down.

I managed to keep the pace pretty steady through the toughest part of the course and had enough left for the last mile and a half, which is mostly downhill or flat! I ended up finishing in 48:38, which is way faster than my goal of 50:00 so I'm pretty confident going into Sunday.

However, I face the Nike+ dilemma in that my Plus is STILL not reporting distances properly. For example, it reported tonight's run as 5.52 miles. So, I decided that if I'm not able to get the thing properly calibrated before Sunday, I'll run the 10k according to the Nike+ even though that will give me a slower time. I think that's the only way I can really participate anyway. Oh well!

I have one more short run planned for this week and then I'm going to take Friday and Saturday off from running to rest up for the race. It should be a fun one, even if I'm running it alone!