"I should have been doing this all along."

Thursday March 24th - Tempo run from Woodland Station to Crossroads Pub in Boston.

Against my better judgement, I decided to join the RFTM crew on the weekly tempo run tonight.
I say against my better judgement because I've already had a high mileage week (28 miles including the New Bedford Half Marathon on Sunday), and still need to do my longest scheduled training run of 21-23 miles on Saturday. The marathon training is quickly coming to an end though, and I haven't made it to a single Thursday night run, so I decided to suck it up and go for it.

After a lot of internal hemming and hawing about whether to park in the city and take the train out to the start, or drive out to the start and then depend on a ride back to the car afterwards, i decided on the later.
Definitely a mistake. More on that later.

I knew I was in trouble when after only the first couple of minutes of running, it was just me, Chrissy Horan and Brian Casey. Everyone else was dropped back already.
I should say here that my mindset going into this run was to pick someone who is about my pace on the long runs and try to stick with them for the tempo run. The problem though, is that these two have been doing the tempo runs all winter long, and this was my first one!

Anyway, as expected, I really suffered through the first few miles as Chrissy dragged me and Brian up Heartbreak. Surprisingly though I really caught a groove after the hill and managed to keep up for the duration of the run. About 5 miles in, Chrissy started doing intervals. I thought that would be the last I saw of her but it turns out that my even tempo sort of balanced out with her up and down tempo, so we pretty much stayed together until the end.

I was surprised and disappointed when I look down at my garmin and saw that my pace for the 9 mile run was 7:58 per mile. Don't get me wrong, it's always great to see a "7" in front of my pace, but I felt like I worked a lot harder than that! Just a few days before I had run the New Bedford Half with a pace of 7:53, and this run was much harder on me than that was! The x-factor, of course, was Heartbreak Hill. There were certainly no hills of this caliber in New Bedford.

I definitely came away from this run feeling good, but also feeling that it would have paid huge dividends for me to be coming to this run every week. Alas, I have a little boy at home, a wife who works nights, and a limited babysitting budget.

The run finished with a very cool discovery.

I knew that my RFTM team members had been finishing their Thursday night tempo runs at Crossroads, but I assumed that it was just them grabbing a beer and heading home to their ice baths. You can imagine my surprise when as I sat on the stoop stretching out, at least a dozen runners I didn't recognize also finished runs and headed into the pub. It turns out that on the upstairs of Crossroads is basically taken over by runners on Thursday nights! To go along with the pitchers of Harpoon IPA, the staff puts out pitchers of ice water and, get this, FREE PIZZA! I must say, it was pretty awesome to not have to feel bad about being all sweaty and stinky because everyone else in the bar was too! Not only that, but when does it ever happen that you go into a bar and have something in common with everyone else in the place?!? Plus, did I mention free pizza?

I'll definitely be trying to make more of these. I'm told it's a year round phenomenon. (though it's probably at it's busiest now with the marathon being so close.)