Week 8: Eight miles

8.42 miles - 2:21:23 hours - 16.8 min/mile

Decided to give the 8-mile run a try, since the weather was supposed to be slightly cooler and breezy today, and the smoke seems to have mostly cleared. And it was a good run. There was just enough hazy cloud to keep the sun from burning down, and a nice light breeze, so I felt good the whole way and felt like I was keeping my pace up. I used the 13.1 app, and at the beginning, Jeff Galloway gave advice about keeping your stride short and turnover quick, so I concentrated on that for my whole run, while I was walking as well as running. I do tend to lengthen my stride when I get tired, which I know leads to injury, so I concentrated on keeping it short and quick. I think it helped. I do wish this app kept track of mile splits—it's hard to know if/how much I slowed down over the course of the run. I felt like I was keeping pace, but without splits, I can't be sure.

I brought my water bottle and shot bloks and tried to remember to take a sip of water and eat one blok every two miles. I think that also helped. I happened to grab one of the packs of bloks that had caffeine, so I got a little boost from that, too.

Overall pace was decent. Much better than the almost-18-minute miles I've been doing on my short runs, but still closer to 17 minutes than 16.

I ran today with a piece of moleskin on the bottom of my right big toe. I have a big scar on the pad of that toe, and if I do a lot of barefoot walking on rough ground, the skin tends to peel around it. It was pretty painful yesterday. I cut some loose bits of skin off, but that left it raw in places. The moleskin helped, I didn't even feel it while I was running. I don't think you're supposed to put moleskin over broken skin. I might be sorry when I have to take it off, but meanwhile, it's nice padding on my sore toe.