9 Miles

Friday was our running group's long run of 9 miles!
I took a turn determining the route ahead of time. I clocked it out in the van acouple of weeks ago. It was a beautiful route,mostly downhill on quiet tree lined streets.
We started out at 5:08 am - it was just starting to get light. The first two miles were mostly uphill but then it was downhill from there. There were 5 of us and we stayed together most of the time with Desiree being the pace setter. She's made to run marathons. I loved running with my Garmin and checking our pace occasionally. We were running under our average pace most of the time. We finished up our run by going through Murray Park and ended at Mimi's for breakfast. That was a fun treat. We ran the 9 miles in 1:47:52 with an average pace of 11:56, that was 27 seconds faster than our previous best average pace (does that make sense).
We enjoyed our breakfast and chatting together while we were all on our runner's high. I faired much better than on the 8 miler - both during the run and after. I wasn't too sore and that was very encouraging. It was a great way to start the day and it was a super busy one (more about that in the next post).