To my history buffs: unlike Washington’s chair, this is definitely a setting sun.

The first 9 miles of this one was roughly a “zone 3” run, which is a bit of a guilty pleasure: neither fast enough to improve my VO2max, nor slow enough for heart rate training, they say that zone 3 runs don’t provide the same physiological benefits of zone 4 (faster) or zone 2 (slower) runs, but sometimes they just feel good! For the next 6 miles, though, I pushed up to a tempo pace somewhere around my goal marathon pace.

I ran to the group run again yesterday, on a dark and soggy evening.

For the first part of this run, I roughly followed a Garmin workout suggestion for sprints, doing 9 x 15sec @ sub-4:00min/mi, with warmup, recoveries, and cooldown. After that, I alternated faster/slower paces for each remaining mile.

The Bainbridge Ultra Running Team (BURT) puts on an ultra every year in February; this was their first year setting up an additional event in October: “das BURT,” a timed run where participants choose either to run a single 4.8mi loop, or to see how many they can complete in 6, 12, or 24 hours. I entered and won first place for the 6-hour category, with 7 loops (logged as 33.5mi) in 5:42.