Pace? What Pace?

Somewhere in my former blog, there is a post very much like this one...

When I trained for the Marine Corps Marathon, I used a training plan developed by Hal Higdon. I like it; it worked for me, on balance, and got me to the start and finish lines in one piece and in a halfway decent time for someone who really only had a vague idea of how long it should take oneself to run 26.2 miles. Part of the training plan was the Saturday Pace run, which is a run of some mileage done at what you plan to have as your race pace. This is followed on Sunday by the long run. The combo of the pace run and the long run back to back supposedly, in the world according to Higdon, kicks up your endurance. Or something. In the end, I had some IT band problems that confounded the last few weeks of my training and I mostly just ran the race itself at what I considered an enjoyable pace.

But, the pace runs themselves always confounded me. I am horrible - truly horrible - at sensing how fast I am running. I have several gears, but they're relative gears, not "numbers" gears. Added to that, I have a severe allergy to running by stopwatch. I don't mind timing runs, or sprints, or whatever, but timing stuff on the go, trying to rejigger my pace, and having to remember where all of my miles begin and end (halfway between X street and Y avenue; at the bridge between the lakes; at Z street; etc.) drives. me. nuts.

I ran yesterday right after karate - as in, I took my gear to class and changed right afterward, and did my route near the dojo. Of course I was very, very warmed up, having had a long class, and without realizing began like a bat out of hell. Result was mile 1, waaaay under half marathon pace. Mile two was closer to pace, but still under, and mile 3? Ugh. Somewhere in mile 3 I hit a long uphill stretch of road that was in pure sunlight (did I mention it was in the upper 80's with high humidity, or does that go without saying for the east coast?), and brain fry started to set in, so I slowed down some. Still, my time was once again well under half pace, despite the impending brain death. I was supposed to do one more mile at pace, but things were going so poorly I punted and (heh, very slowly) jogged the rest of the route. I finished only slightly over pace for the whole thing, but the run was basically a big FAIL because I was really never on pace at all.

And somehow, the most important part to me is that I had the freaking good sense to throttle back when things weren't going nearly on plan and the heat was starting to bug me. I don't always do that. Is this a sign of aging?

So - it's on to week 7 in yogaland. This week, as mentioned in comments, introduces headstand, and looks much more interesting than last week. This is the second to last week of the program, and while book gives some suggestions as to what to do after you've finished, I haven't given it much thought. I could repeat the program or parts of the program, or intermix practises from the program with DVDs, or just say, HMMM, interesting experiment, and go on to something else. Guess I'll think about it more in two weeks. :p

I have a lot to do on the potential "back to school" project this week. I've been in contact with some admissions people, and am going to get myself into community college this fall to take anatomy and physiology. I need two semesters of that for most schools, and frankly I'd also like to take exercise physiology, but need to take A&P first. So I'm off to the local CC tomorrow to try to talk to someone in admissions there, because they offer a couple of different flavors of A&P and I don't know which would be best for me. I also need a lot of volunteer hours - some schools specify a number, and some schools seem to stress variety of experience over hours. So I have to start looking into that, too. AND, I have to take the GREs, which totally freaks me out for some reason.

And of course, I finally had the ultimate freak out moment. What if I CAN'T get into grad school? I mean, I've pretty much operated my whole life on the presumption that I can basically do whatever I set my mind to, and for the most part, that's been true. But I'm 20 plus years out of college, with some grades I'm not exactly proud of (nothing too shocking, but not straight A's), trying to get into a competitive graduate program... What if - ? But then again, what if I don't try? I'll be no better off, and won't have learned anything new, to boot.

Heh, so there, negative thoughts. Time to go stand on my head.