Surprised Myself

This Saturday was mile repeats. Funny, I'm now really finding out what all of these terms I see in Runners' World mean! When the schedule stated "3 miles" I wasn't sure how it would be accomplished, but it was a 10 minute warm up, two 1 mile repeats with 5 minutes rest in between, and a mile cool down. The goal here was to do the second mile faster than the first. The second mile didn't need to be faster by much (a couple seconds was fine), but I was nervous about this because the second time around only meant that it would be hotter out there! I actually surprised myself though - the first mile was 9:05. This was 12 seconds faster than my timed mile from last Saturday. I thought to myself during my 5 minutes of rest there was no way I could do it again. 2nd mile start was great, but I saw myself drop the pace at around .75 in...I wasn't sure what to do to get back on track. Luckily I always carry water with me because a little water as it was warming up out there got me around the corner at a quick enough pace to finish it out at 9:03 - 2 seconds faster than the first mile, but that was all it needed to be! By the way, did I mention I love my Garmin at times like this? :) I also think I did well running with my friend James - he is typically much faster than me so far in our training, but he unfortunately had a bit of knee pain that day so I did my best to keep up with him until that last quarter mile. Always motivating to have fast friends! I do hope his pain goes away though - that's never a good thing even if he helped my pace for the day. Can't remember what tomorrow night holds - I'm sure I'll have something interesting to report on Wednesday!