Never Say Never

I use the Nike+ program to track my walks/runs. Mostly walking these days, training for the Eugene Women's Half Marathon on September 4th. That race is my next goal, with a goal of finishing around 3:10 or under - hopefully right at 3 hours. July 4th I'll do the Sauvie Island Flat Half, that's just for fun. I have a warped sense of fun. My second next goal is to run the Holiday 10k. All that to say, I log a lot of miles into Nike+. I also get emails from the program, the latest one was about a competition on the Nike Running Facebook page. This week's challenge was to post a picture of your run where you finished faster than you started. I deleted the email, "I never finish faster!" What a ridiculous notion!

Saturday morning the training group that I am part of, Foot Traffic University, met at the Pumpkin Patch on Sauvie Island for a little preview run/walk of the Flat Half; a straight out and back of the final three miles. It was a beautiful day, the sun was shining gloriously, the breeze was just a bit cool so I didn't get too hot. My only complaint was the lady who steered her old white Aerostar van right at me, nearly pegging me. Thankfully on race day, cars will not be allowed on the road. Using the Nike+ GPS app on my IPhone I get feedback every 15 minutes of how much time has elapsed, mileage covered, and average pace. I start slow and after a mile or so, I start to warm up and get into my groove. On Saturday, my groove was groovy. I felt really good, strong, and capable - despite the short night of sleep. At mile 3 when I start to level out, I started to notice that my average pace was increasingly going down. This trend continued for the next three miles. I had to stop at one point - I had rubbed my eye and dislodged my contact, in case it fell out I had to stay put. But I could feel it was still in my eye, just stuck somewhere, so I quickly started up again. The last mile I had to keep myself from running, my legs were turning over fast as they could. To my complete astonishment I ended my 6 mile walk with my fastest average (walking only) pace ever.

I had just done, what I thought I never did.

So what else have I not done, because I believed I wasn't capable?

Today, I took a snapshot of my splits and entered the contest!